2011 Christmas Special
by KING FELIX
Summary: Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. The spirit of HC, usually hanging above us all like a pathos-ridden storm cloud, now flutters above us like a drunkenly-meditative snow flurry. Written entirely while commuting -where's my medal, c-?


2011 Christmas Special

'The bravest psychotherapists have gone so far as venturing that the most important 'healing' force in the therapeutic equation is love. The very breath of such a notion is, of course, enough to send the orthodox technicians of psychotherapy scurrying behind ramparts of objectivity, from where it can safely be regarded as preposterous nonesense'.

- Professor David Smail, 'Illusion and Reality'.

'He would never have sat down at the same table with him had he strength of will to deny himself the company of his compatriots on Christmas Eve. He could not play the part of a neutral, a non-communist. But there was no question of explaining, either, that socialist truth progresses in a devious, roundabout way'.

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 'The First Circle'.

Say beautiful coloured lights: a flipside to the cold velvet firmament. Leave it all to God's discernment. Holden had a glimpse of the rainbow bulbs atop the newly-completed World Trade masts. Downwards, scant feet away from the billowing snowstorm –American hero, American traitor Benedict Arnold holding up the national flag of Vietnam. Smirk-benevolent-faced Benedict Arnold, in template form, being hoisted into place by girlish hands, soon to be brought to life by clouds of luxurious auto paint. Pheobe moved rapidly but with a delicacy that was uniquely hers. Holden watched in wonder. Welcome to the world of delicate-hearted criminal artists. Every now and again, from somewhere just beyond the park parameter, maybe in Broadway or 59th, a police siren whizzed to life, making her shoulders tense animalistically. Delicate-hearted all the way, as they squinted through the snow.

"God, that sounded pretty nearby. Are you sure you're looking in all directions?"

He frowned heavily; certainly he was looking in all directions, and all he could see was dense snowfall. In the foreground it was like swirling mist, in the distance it took the movement of a heavy show-curtain tumbling shut. No doubt it was the perfect cover for a plain-sight 'outlaw-artist' (or 'graffiti artist' as they were called in Europe -Pheobe never could make up her mind which term she preferred). Besides, he couldn't understand her fear for a moment. Surely if she was bold enough to conceive of doing it, she was bold enough to physically see it through? He shook his head. His ever-girlish sister; he loved her so much -she killed him.

"Every cop in the city is probably frozen on his street corner. Just like we will be if you don't hurry up. I'm turning blue, and how'd ya like that?"

The image was finished anyway. Between encroaching slavers of ice, there it was, not exactly as clear as paint on a canvas, but frighteningly bold -you felt giddy at the queasy, misty edges versus the obvious staying-power of the industrial paint. Indeterminate-age Arnold's expression was in on the juxtaposed irony, every cheeky nuance of it. Holden tried hard to imagine how the passers-by would react the next day... and found he could not.

From the nexus of very modern walkways near the edge of the park, they took their chances at finding a quick and easy route back to Guggenheim Street. Near the heart of each ornamental junction, the pathways all made promises towards the Picasso-roofed apartments just off the Delacorte shopping ring. Gritty stone walls and secretive store staff rooms, though they were resistant to letting the snow and ice settle, took on ridiculously sombre shades of grey. The avenues of New York had never seemed more enclosed to Holden, and what's more, the narrow slants of sky were crazily near, the paint-drenched canvas of some hysterical Warhol acolyte -look if you want. Holden felt terribly weary -apparently in difference to Pheobe. At an anonymous waste bin, she disposed of her spent spray can and the mounds of carpet tape, skipped forward in excited, exhilarated bounds. He felt himself smile a little, while to the outside world, he knew his trademark scowl wouldn't have budged a millimetre.

For some time, they walked free, and happy, at one with the drifting snow.

Arriving to woo him was the idea of laying in his bed fast asleep - the thought quickly becoming a vivid daydream that ran parallel with his snow-trudging feet. He knew. It was that funny type of exhaustion that got worse if you had lots of things to look at and lots of things to think about. If you could just retreat inside your mind and think about nothing, at least you had a chance of being able to fight off the unconsciousness. But haroo if you had a scintillating, buzzing snow-scape to look at; it merged with your drifting mind to drag you under.

From a heavy-set junction of stores, the wild blizzard produced something new. Just as wild. A man flailed outwards into the open street -on fire. Perhaps, he was -in the early stages of being on fire. He arched his back, swung his shoulders quite purposefully. Then the broad flash of light lanced out to envelope him, to cling tightly and form a phosphorescent halo around the whole of his body. Headlights of a saviour, thought Holden optimistically. Except no. The light was something weird, absolutely. It extinguished every feature of his body until he was a glowing silhouette -therein a perfectly visible network of bones.

Nowhere near having the presence of mind to run, Pheobe merely skidded and took a white-cloudy gasp. Holden grasped her arm as they were witness to whole clusters and crowds attempting to run free from the enclosed avenues. They gaped at the phosphorescent radiation as it consumed teeming bodies en masse. They awaited an explanation; anything at all.

After a long sequence of teetering heartbeats, as the last of the city-dwellers fell forward before the wave of invaders -the monsters themselves appeared. They were tanks. Strange, futuristic tanks, incredibly small, probably too small even to accommodate a man. No tracks, either. Not that Holden could see. Just an angled, pepper-pot skirt of dozens of tiny hemispheres. And those bizarre, swinging eye-stalks slanting through the blizzard.

As for the explanation about what was happening, it came all too quickly. The terrible tank-creatures spoke it again and again. Holden had never heard a single word spoken so enthusiastically and by so many individual voices, not even when ranks of Nazis said, 'Heil!' in museum newsreels.

"EXTERMINATE".

The bulk of the fleeing people were blazed away to nothing. Holden felt paralysed as he held on to Pheobe's arm. Several of the survivors were scattering more or less directly towards them. The perspective was something hideous as they were transformed to living, low-watt bulbs, spasming skeletons, people-shaped voids which caused the snow to swirl wildly.

The tank-creatures approached, and finally Holden and Pheobe felt their hearts turn over with the impetus to run. If only the temptation to glance around wasn't equally powerful. The tank-creatures moved neatly and purposefully. In a way, they were beautiful. He noted that above each domed turret there was the set-piece of two illuminated horns, which pulsed brightly whenever the creatures spoke, "EXTERMINATE". The bulbs flashed brilliant scarlet. They flashed blue, and white, and a strange, distant emerald. The shining colours were wondrous, wholly transcendental. Holden stared in wonder and let it flow over him. It was also around this time that he realised in earnest that he and Pheobe couldn't realistically hope to get clear. The snow blasted them. The burning city in their foresight was too disorientating by half.

Tank-creatures appeared at most if not all angles. Pheobe fell down and he shielded her as best he could. An eerie, timeless period of waiting followed. The robotic voices swarmed all around. "EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINATE, DE-STROY". His life flashed before him. Mostly it was just a feeling: bitterness. Sometimes the ugly notion that, if they miraculously survived, they'd be goddamned duty-bound to go their parent's house, rather than their own cosy apartment. Come flashing lights, come.

"EXTERMINATE", said an all-silver tank-creature to Holden, Holden individually, or so it seemed. A world-tingling buzz became his lot, for a little while. He remembered seeing his and Pheobe's sparse-looking skeletons laid bare, only to wonder how this was even possible if his eyes and brains had been reduced to a radioactive glow.

Attacked from the heart of a colourful storm. Mr Chief-Attacker, idly wondering on your tyrannical business. Walking through a colourful storm, on this occasion a blizzard and the political commentary of your beloved sister. Buzzed away by the pepperpot tanks; you expect me to be intrigued, Mr Chief-Attacker, and through this dialogue, you and I: Kane and Abel plus Groucho. This is Attack Number I-Forget-How-Many. Why should it feel any different now? Tyrannical flap-jawed jerks. Holden spiralled. The heart of a colourful storm, if only it was permanent. Say beautiful coloured lights: a flipside to the cold velvet firmament. Leave it all to God's discernment. And JFK in the passenger side. Give a blanket to your pillow-brained brother on this cold alien metal. Meanwhile; overly reverential sleep guiding all philosophy, all senses in repose bar the secret human bat-radar that tells of swooping through giant chambers. "Humans, you will explain your resilience". Mr Chief-Attacker. Mr Chief-Attacker and your loveable army of genocidal robots. Loveable because they look stupid-but-not-concieted. Just like everyone.

Pheobe grasped his upper-arm and Holden became fully conscious. Instant and gratifying confusion about whether they were really in a metallic dungeon, or in a room that merely _resembled_ a metallic dungeon -this matter became immaterial. The place was indeed huge, though reduced in their conception by the presence of at least a dozen tank-creatures, their coloured horns flashing and eye-stalks darting REM spasms.

"HUMANS, YOU WILL EXPLAIN YOUR RESILIENCE!", said a modest blue-and-silver model.

Holden dizzily observed how his little sister gaped and shook her head numbly. It was a reaction mirrored by a fellow prisoner, a middle-aged man sitting tall, just beyond Pheobe's shoulder.

Holden rubbed his face. "What is this? What are you guys? Are you Russians? This is unbelievable. I ought to snap those goddamn eye-stalks right off you crazy things -"

He found he was speaking from the heart, and from nowhere, though he couldn't blame himself. It seemed pretty obvious that the creatures were aliens, if not Russians, but what difference did it make anyway? You had these guys that were suave in their yelling, bold in the way they shouted the odds and lorded it over you. He'd known about them all his life, from his original first-grade school, to a certain degree at Pencey, then to a wholly maddening degree at the military school his parents had sent him to at the tail end of '52. They gave you your orders, which in a way was fair enough, but never once did they observe the cardinal rule of being a bully. You might drive your victim to despair, but you'll never manage to kill them dead, and they'll always find a way to cede the idea that you're a jerk, maybe even more of a jerk than you are just for being a bully. It was crazy. Admittedly, or maybe case-in-point, old James Castle had jumped through the window and died, and look at how the bullies instantly regretted what they'd done. No one had any self-insight.

Holden royally chewed-out the lead tank-creature, right up to the point where he felt Pheobe's hand on his arm, imploring him to stop. He tried to spill away his ire, he really did, and it almost worked. Finally, Pheobe spoke up.

"Holden, will you hush? You're going to get us all killed. These things are just evil".

A surge of adrenaline, and he shrugged. "I don't care! 'Just' nothing. They're goons. Ya hear that? Goons all the way!"

The army of captors moved frantically and angrily, and were obviously running out of patience. Pheobe begged, "Holden! You're no good in an emergency! You're going to get us killed!"

The silver-and-blue tank-creature coasted at speed and placed a sucker-arm cleanly over Holden's mouth. Muffled protests were delivered, a slight struggle, mainly astonishment that the ferocious 'sucker' felt like nothing more than a very malleable, household sink-plunger. It was high time for their cell-mate to speak up; Holden could narrowly see the man through his strangulated vision. Bizarrely, he wore a First World War officer's uniform, complete with bound ankles as per the notoriously muddy trenches. A reasonable assumption was that he'd been at a fancy-dress party at the time of the invasion.

"The young man is right" - his crisp English accent only served to reinforce the idea of a man-out-of-time. The shouting and commotion, which was obviously something the creatures brought with them as a natural by-product, caused the man to repeat himself in a voice that was both forceful and devastatingly human. "The young man -"

"YOU WILL EXPLAIN YOUR INVULNERABILITY TO OUR EXTERMINATION RAYS".

I've seen all this before, said the steely look in the man's eyes. The featureless metal behind their spines looked practically impervious; it went well with the man's eyes. All this Holden thought as he half-suffocated.

"If you would like the secret of our invulnerability, you will treat us with respect", said the captain-costumed man in a careless, calm, practically deified tone. "But if you continue this belligerence, we'd rather have our souls torn apart than tell you anything".

More commotion, as per. An almost-pop-art expression of zeal, as the creatures slid their angled skirts backwards and forwards over the smooth floor. And it never rains but it pours; some of the tantalising lights on the wall frantically flashed red. Red alert. The creatures, still raging, still ranting, departed for their battlestations. Holden breathed deeply. He also meditated on the triangular-shaped blast-doors. The childish way that they matched almost exactly the shape of the tank-creatures. Childish and quaint, as if some gnomes had constructed a monolithic battleship, then given the doors the same contours of their little dopey hats - all to allow them to pass through like shapes in a child's activity board.

The prisoners drew apart slightly in a measure of human decorum, if that even meant anything anymore. Such an uncompromising metal prison; Holden guessed from the lack of reverberation, the walls must be at least two feet thick. What a battleship. Drifting into the similarly dark eyes of the English army captain, he tried to make an expression, make himself comfortable.

"Where are we? On a battleship, out at sea?"

"One would assume so. I am Captain Elliott Spencer". And he said this conspiratorially, as if in the peripheral vision of some ugly god.

In turn, Holden and Pheobe introduced themselves (Pheobe 'Malmesbury' Caulfield she'd decided on lately). Shill, energetic alarm or no, Holden found it pretty easy to think. While his bones ached in the most spurious way, he brooded, considered it all with care. That the creatures were bullies -fine, in a way. For one thing, they hadn't laughed or scoffed at the melodramatic 'we'd rather have our souls torn apart'. No reaction, either, to the theatrical, vaguely hangdog expression which the man Spencer had used in his face-off. It spoke of a pretty responsible exchange of emotions inside those bowl metal heads. Sparing. Spare it all except the angry determination.

The red alert lights didn't lose their ferocity for a second. All very reassuring, because it meant the tank-creatures were tied up in the emergency, allowing the prisoners precious time to think. Plus the emergency, whatever it was, didn't seem to impact on them at all; the deck beneath their folded legs remaining steady, with no sound of battle or calamity - until a colossal metallic screech brought the tension to bear. Tension or shock. There was no time to think. Certainly the screech didn't sound like it had been wrought by ship-to-ship artillery - it was too hollow for that. A theme-park jolt -surely the only giddy ride that thrill-seeking Pheobe had never managed to enjoy- and the heavy-set deck made an impossibly low descent. That they'd remained conscious, in fact, was a matter of awe. Holden tumbled in mid air. Reflexes demanded he reach for the wall or the frictionless floor, if only the world wasn't a frantically spinning void. Split seconds of continued consciousness, he knew full well, were miniature gifts from God. Christmas presents. Obviously he would eventually lose consciousness in a mighty whack of blood. Gasp as the metal walls sheared in an eruption of speeding seawater. These were the elements of death which he awaited impatiently. His awkward shoulders protected him as he was blown backwards. Eventually the dream of being on a sinking ship, in the Christmas present glimpses of consciousness, were replaced by something more awesome -a gasp that won't fade for some time. The entirety of the far end of the chamber was cleaved away to reveal an impossibly distant landscape, from a perspective of five or six miles in the air. The curvature of the planet, plus a sheen of blue ozone that was bold with tiny green mountain ranges and defiantly matte coastlines. Eagles looking upwards in envy.

Pheobe edged forward. "Jeez-louise!" Just the noise alone, Holden realised, was awesome. As the hysterical windspeed played on the jagged metal gouges, the exposed struts that looked human after all, it sounded like the score of some phoney, over-sincere horror film. Implication: 'something awesome is about to happen'. And yet the awesome thing was already happening; the eerie tension was just a plaything of the sky-gods. Pheobe's hair swirled violently in the perpetual zeal. Holden felt a similar swirling at the edges of his skull. It was the chin-cords of his famous red hunting cap. As for Spencer -he stood before them both. His expression was simply -exhilarated. After the initial flare of upper-atmosphere blue, and now they were closer to the surface, the planet-scape could be discerned in more human levels of scrutiny.

What they saw predominantly was coloured lights. Too big and too randomly-arranged to be streetlights, all radiating such a rich, vibrant, homely feeling. Spheres of cherry-purple, red, green. A clear, delicate white. No dark blue. No sky or sea blue. It was a searing shade, not quite electric, but then nothing that appealed to the casual observer as particularly 'blue' when the eyes scanned for a corona. Rather. The essence of glowing, overwhelming, razor-sharp periwinkle -beautiful. There was a nice, pretentious yellow also. Off-purple and off-orange, though never too far off. These colours you love. Holden stared on wistfully, tidal-shifting deckplates or no. Unconsciousness came gradually with a kneeding of metal, at points all across his body. Now there was just a few subconscious traces; hints, mostly, of being in a violently crashing spaceship. Impressive, in a weird, academic way, and presently swallowed up in grateful oblivion.

The crash-landing proceeded monstrously, slowly calmed down, then finally reached an equinox of deep silence and electrical snaps. On the resumption of Holden's vision, the slight and desperate cognitive functions taking place in his aching temples -everything was muted, painfully attuned to the scrunched-up cave of heavy metal. Pheobe was alive and unblooded, and crawled along the slanted, 45 degree deckplate -interestingly the fins of the walls and the nearby entrance were almost at a regular angle now. Also alive; Captain Elliott Spencer, through he was doubled up from a tiny shard of metal that had become lodged in his cranium. Most interesting of all; there was a trace of dusky daylight. It was subdued, since it was emanating from around several corners and a heavy section of collapsed bulkhead. But it was something to make for.

Pheobe promised them both that she was uninjured. Holden was not entirely sure he believed her, partly because it was all far too miraculous, and partly because he himself was busy denying a hideous pain in his foot. They manhandled their aching bodies over the fragmented slabs of metal, taking time because of the tingling, pins-and-needles after-effect of the crash, too much adrenaline, etceteras (it was the Englishman Spencer who'd spoken of 'pins-and-needles', gratefully distracting the New Yorkers with such a quaint turn of phrase). For the most part, the environment was silent. Where there was a residual hum of space-age energy, it was dying.

Joyous daylight slanted on their faces as they emerged from the wreckage. There was also a keen vision of the giant glowing spheres so far in the distance. They were truly colossal, and the ethereal glow they emitted -red, pink, that reassuring blue- was easily equal to the gigantic size. Between the wreck and the distant baubles; a lively, rolling desert with Cowboy vegetation.

The temptation to run free, breath deeply and relax was there immediately, and Holden knew it must be ten times worse for his sensitive little sister. But the drama kicked up once more and in all ferocity. A middle-aged woman, presumably a fellow prisoner of the tank-creatures, was desperately trying to move free from the wreckage. Desperately, because she was covered in blood and supported by limbs that were obviously numb with pain. Out into the open desert, an impressive distance, except it was obviously just a reflex. She was in shock. The deep shock which, Holden guessed, was usually only seen by ambulance drivers when they attended savage auto smashes. The way she made such high, modulating noises suggested she was both moaning in agony, but also trying to communicate the weird intellectual truisms the situation presented to her. Staring at the sky in amazement. It was made doubly surreal by the clothes she wore; she wore a huge toga, so folded that it had probably looked like rags even at the best of times.

The Caulfield party moved in behind her, hesitant at the horror. A darkly humourous little junction, when all their apprehension hit a wall - the woman keeled over, causing everybody to fall into a Three Stooges bundle. It straight away seemed obvious that she'd died, not least because there was a juxtaposition to the sudden silence, the most effective challenge to a desert-scape silence that you could possibly imagine -the woman had been carrying a tiny bundle; it was a gently crying baby.

Pheobe scooped up the tiny-voiced creature even as the woman was coolly pronounced dead by Spencer. Group-member Number Four was almost-but-not-quite uninjured. At some point, a sharp corner had snagged away at the swaddling and produced a little scratch just beneath the ribs on his left side. In all likelihood, the baby's carer hadn't even noticed it. Pheobe held the baby up by his arms while Spencer examined the wounds. "I know it hurts!", he said in response to the wailing. Holden stared up at mysterious glowing spheres in the distance. He felt light-headed, and could do nothing to fight it. A crying baby. Sentinels of glowing blue, purple, orange -refusing to be moved by the humans' plight, or somehow protecting them with brightly coloured sentiment.

The loss and regaining of consciousness, coupled with the ability to keep track of every tender philosophical highlight, reminded him of his nervous breakdown on leaving Pencey. In the end, full consciousness hit him with the force of a second crash-landing, and he clung to it. He was sitting on a slight rise of rocks, and Spencer had sauntered up beside him. He held an outstretched finger in front of Holden's eyes and moved across the various dimensions, asking, "Do you think you're injured?"

Holden didn't connect the visual test with Spencer's tacit belief that he'd suffered a brain injury -he simply mentioned his agonised foot and the suspicion that he'd broken some of his toes.

"Let's see what's causing the pain", said Spencer, and removed Holden's shoe and sock, in the manner of a kindly nurse.

Holden looked over at the Pheobe, who was speaking adult-orientated words of reassurance to the tiny child. Glowing coloured spheres on the horizon: beautiful, even if they were no more than shrugging, figurative shoulders.

"Does it hurt when I do this?", asked the Captain, wiggling the little toe of the afflicted foot.

"Yeah. Pretty badly, if I had to be honest", said Holden.

Promised Spencer, "They're not broken".

Holden frowned a little. "Are you sure?"

It was with trace profundity, a dogged smile, that Spencer locked eyes, "If they were broken, you would have screamed in pain".

"How d'ya know I didn't want to scream?"

Followed by dogged smile redux; "I didn't mean to denigrate your senses. As a battlefield officer, observing your combatants being brought low, you quickly come to understand the caprices of pain, where it's subtle and where it's blunt. It's a language that takes a lifetime to learn, if not longer".

Holden relaxed his jumping neck-muscles and was fascinated by the sight of Pheobe and the baby. Though he looked back at Spencer after barely a second. "So you really are a soldier? What, you were home for the holidays when they took you?"

Spencer smiled steadily. "I was actually glaring over a misty furlong of no-man's-land waiting for our Prussian brothers to attack. The ragged and muddy hell of the Verdun plains, France. Machine guns, rolls of razor wire. 'High drama', you might say. But then the drama got higher when our mechanical friends arrived".

Prussians. Trench warfare in France. Holden had no idea what to say to this, and so he said zip.

"My feeling is", Spencer smoothed his palms over his wing trousers, "I should scout for signs of civilisation, and the likeliest landmark is those". He gestured at the glowing spheres in the distance.

"Let me come along, too", said Holden.

"Well, if your foot allows", shrugged Spencer.

Pheobe protested that they should all stay together. Perhaps she had a point, if only Holden wasn't still fired up over 'Holden, you're no good in an emergency' back aboard the spaceship.

"Pheobe", he sighed, trying to sound on top of it all, "just think how easily those metal things burned up the crowds we saw. We were OK all along. There's no harm in splitting up. We'll try to get some help, maybe get some food, then come right back and get you. In the meantime, if there's any sign of danger, you and the baby just head back in to the wreckage".

Pheobe's expression as she looked at the child, frantically coochie-cooed him, was loving and exasperated both.

The desert raised hardly any dust as they trudged away towards the horizon; it was doughy and compacted, making Holden feel tired, a prisoner to his faltering heart. From a distance of a hundred feet or so, alongside an obfuscation of rocky slopes, he turned around and shot her a slightly bedazzled smile. Innovatively, he chose to give her the thumbs-up, too, which is what he remembered doing whenever they parted ways as children. In reality, he'd probably only done it once or twice, and was clinging to the memory of how she'd grinned. Following the sprightly World War One phantom once more, he was dimly excited. The desert was a stock desert, and that was pretty reassuring. The way the open spaces were crowded with tufts of grass and gnarled rocks: secretive. Oftentimes vast, also highly distracting, leading off to a wilderness of lazy hillsides and bumpy plateauxs. Probably there were lizards they could chow, or some kind of lettuce cousin that retained water. He thought about this, then thought about nothing, then stared earnestly at the coloured lights. By now the atmosphere was getting twi-lit; it made him feel nervous and cold. Staring back towards the downed flying saucer, he noted for the first time how the heavily-bent underside was covered with hemispheres, whatsmore hemispheres that were misty in the manner of blown industrial light bulbs. Wondering, could they be of the same moon-man technology as the giant spheres which lay beyond? That this was planet of the Tank-Creatures seemed obvious, though only in a very small, petrified part of his consciousness, which was currently too superstitious by half to give voice to. Such a bizarre sequence of events, though. 'How come you don't need time to digest all this like a regular human being? How come it's all so breezey?' - was all he wanted to ask of Spencer. Though he didn't. It would be an insult. To himself. To that other bizarre and persecuted waiting period, the famous one - marking his nervous breakdown after Pencey. It had been snowing then, too. The old NB.

So he trudged on, acquiescent to the gloom and doom. Why not? Everyone has to die sometime. Taking advantage of last of the twilight, he rolled up the sleeve of his left arm, which for some time had been afflicted by a sweat-ridden itch. He expected to see a section of mildly scaly skin, sweat-dirt - what he saw was a small tattoo of blue figures, alienesque, six or seven characters. Were they numbers or letters? There was no way of knowing. Though they looked a lot more practical and utilitarian than Chinese, they still made him feel he could never learn their meaning in a thousand years.

"Do you have one of these?", he asked of Spencer.

The Captain paused, looked around and gingerly rolled up the sleeve of his shiney-buttoned felt. "I do indeed. No doubt a means of identification. We should be reassured; at least it shows they weren't going to kill us".

"Are you kidding me?", Holden tensed his shoulders. "They look just the same as the ones from Nazi concentration camps".

"From where?"

Holden shuddered. All in all, he felt like he was conversing with a character from a dream. "Capt Spencer, what year do you make it? That might sound like a crazy question but -"

"But?", Spencer smiled suavely.

Holden frowned and waited for the Captain to give up his answer. "1917. What year do you make it, Mr Caulfield?"

Holden shrugged, a kind of reflex to the threshold of high drama, numb drama. "1973".

Sandy strips of earth converged at angles. It was between one such cluster that Spencer halted and pointed across the narrow way, the baroque matte painting leading nowhere except disquieted oblivion. Red sky at night, and if it's dark red, the shepherd delights in Satanism. Equate it all with the insanely harsh cross-country runs of Holden's schooldays, which he otherwise would have enjoyed. Little or no stirred-up dust allowed them to witness forty or fifty Tank Creatures moving stealthily to the horizon. Strangely, they seemed to be heading into open desert. Then, as Holden and Spencer's eyes pulled back and back, dreamily, they picked out the most fascinating sight of all.

Spencer drew his pitted Holland revolver, moved forward in a military sidle that well-suited the gait of his wing trousers.

"Let us investigate", he said bluntly, causing Holden to reflect how the word 'investigate' could be pronounced with the same breath of awe as if he'd said 'kill' or 'slaughter'. 'Depart for hell'. Nevertheless: be a sidekick. They moved quickly from their original path, despite the tantalising outlines of coloured light which proximity to the giant spheres had created.

A few steps-worth of slope took them to a flat area where a lone Tank Creature had fallen onto its side, thanks to squwally green weeds by the dozen. Something had happened to the space between its two arms and neck-grills; there were slide-out hatches of metal, revealing a deep, circuitry-ridden cavity. Looking out between the haphazard thorns, and following a ghostly, snake-like sound - they witnessed an octopus-themed alien creature making good its escape. Holden identified it as a truly pathetic sight. From the start, however, it was Spencer who took greatest delight in the vulnerable position the alien found itself in -plus the irony of their fearsome metal captors being no more than tiny, fragile ground-crawlers. Evolution had given them nothing whatsoever to be proud of; the tendrils by which it jerked its way along the ground were stringy and badly jointed. The barely-blinking cyclops eye was far too ponderous. Guiltily ponderous. Even in an underwater environment, the creature wouldn't have had much grace, Holden decided. The bulbous and vein-throbbing cranium-stroke-torso held too much bulk and the eye might simply have been a sunny-side-up yoke.

Yes indeed it was Spencer who took greatest pleasure in one of their abductors being brought low, so incredibly low. Even without the harsh psychological bluntness which World War One must have instilled in his heart, his delight was far too bright and immediate.

"How the mighty have fallen", he said with no slight melodrama. He boomed out the words, and if the creature heard him, all the better. If not, the oppressively still desert nightscape was a post-modern god of vengeance. It appreciated every nuance of irony.

"I think the poor guy needs to be inside his war-suit to be able to talk", said Holden, eyeing up the small, beak-like aperture which reposed far below the glaring eyeball and amid sinewy webs of flesh. He realised that perhaps he'd said something obvious, though Spencer was kind enough to fall in with him.

"Holden", said the Captain sonorously. "Take hold of our little prisoner for a moment".

The slight and fairly lilly-livered panic that Spencer was about to stamp on the creature was something which Holden easily put aside. He did as he was told. Grasped the surprisingly solid mass which was Mr Alien's cranium, saying: slither no more. The pull which was exerted on Holden was baby-like, really. The eye moved dreamily, perhaps panic-stricken, perhaps merely adrenalised as a good soldier ready to act.

Meanwhile, Captain Spencer was working. Unseathed and fixed in a wholly automatic stroke of his hands, he used his great, shining bayonet to stab away at the hovercraft pads built into the base of the metallic skirt. Then, half a minute of hard labour allowed him to haul the war-machine chassez back into a standing position and smash the extermination-nozzle with a heavy rock. The two humans became lost in the savagery of these actions; it was when the immobilization was finished, and Spencer's crooked smile remained, that Holden felt truly queasy. He felt the slab-shaped mounds of flesh throb heavily beneath his fingertips. Perhaps the creature was nervous about what was about to happen to it, or perhaps it was just war-like apprehensive. The latter could be pathos-ridden just the same.

Placing the creature back in its computerised housing put him mind of his parent's neighbour, Mr Alleyton, a big-shot industrialist, as he man-handled his thousand-dollar koi carp into the tiny pond every springtime. Such a tiny, circular pond on such a large, circular lawn. Artistically shocking, though he didn't suppose the fish had half as strong sensibilities to mind much. Spencer drew back and twinkle-smiled in the manner of some mysterious villain. Holden couldn't help it though; leaning forward on his knees and wincing as an almost imperceptible sliver of grey flesh made artful contact with what could only be a mechanical voice synthesiser. It glowed blue as the tiny creature spoke. As he spoke his words of quaintly-indoctrinated hate. The eye, ditto, made a slight roll, settling back into it's cosy quagmire of zeal, antagonism, war. Some creatures are just lucky.

"YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED", it said. It was a tone that seemed slower and more considered now -perhaps this owed to its weakened state. Or perhaps it was just a trick of the brain because so far they'd only heard the electro-gargling rants as they overlapped from inside a crowd -maybe.

Spencer, of course, reacted coolly. His lively, soulful eyes neither confirmed or denied the possibility that soon they would be 'exterminated'. It was a delicate psychological manoeuvre which the aliens wouldn't be able to understand, not in a thousand years. Holden wasn't sure he could himself.

"Where are we?", he asked patiently.

"CONQUERED GALAXY 1261. WESTERN HEMISPHERE. YOU WILL SUBMIT TO THE RULE OF THE DALEK EMPIRE".

There it was, another little point of fascination, the way this 'Dalek' had so quickly given up such key information, almost in a boastful way. Surely -keep prisoners in the dark and on a need-to-know basis? Obviously, his intergalactic Empire was so successful and all-conquering, even military doctrine had started to slide.

"You speak proudly of your empire", Spencer sneered slightly, "considering your comrades seem to have abandoned you to a slow crawl of starvation, pain, in all likelihood the prospect of being picked apart by crows while you shiver and weep, alone".

"THE DALEKS KNOW NO FEAR". Spoken as a matter of deep, taciturn fact. "OUR SOCIETY IS STRONGER THAN ANY PETTY, HUMANOID CIV-IL-I-SATION".

"What's your name?", asked Holden.

"I AM DALEK HAHARMAN", was the surprisingly forthcoming response.

"And your comrades -" From over Spencer's ever-relaxed shoulders, the army of Daleks were still just about visible. "They seem to be making quite an exodus. Where are they going?"

Again, the creature glibly surrendered the information with almost heart-warming candour. "THE NEAREST RE-EVOL CENTRE IS IN THE CITY OF SILVER AND PLATINUM, THIRTY-SIX RECIGS DISTANT. YOU ARE MY PRISONERS. YOU WILL ESCORT ME THERE".

Holden laughed heartily. The glare of the recently-arrived night atmosphere gave the whole scene a clinical -but far from humourless vibe. He laughed, even if it was just at the irony, soon eclipsed by fear.

Spencer did not laugh. Kicking his dainty boots across the damp sand, then moving more solemnly the closer he got to 'Haharman'. Scant inches away, he laid the gun butt between his feet and toyed with the barrel as it lolled around at waist height. In any other situation, this would be a wholly subconscious and at-ease pose, but the three of them knew: he was doing it merely to intimidate. Not that Holden disapproved, either. It was intimidation so gentle it was almost high art. The bayonet barely glinted; still Haharman's gaze followed it in trepidation.

"Down the hours of torture you're about to experience", said the Captain thoughtfully, "this moment now will seem like a memory of heaven".

He levelled the tip of the steel directly in front of Harharman's giant eye. Spleen and ill-temper emanated in waves. Well, Holden supposed it was ill-temper: for the alien's part, there was no particular knotting in the brow, no wincing, no condensing of crow's feet. It was nothing more than a glint. He wanted to ask why the Daleks had decimated Planet Earth, though the question was stupid and formulated itself in his mind in a stupid way. Overly plaintive. Certainly, Spencer was beyond such concerns. From the subtlest and most evil smile in the world, brilliantly pale in the velvet night, it was obvious he was about to kill the prisoner.

And then all present were shocked by a sound that was inherently heart-warming. It was the slow-cantering trot of horses. Carrying their sense of calm all the way, the riders appeared thirty or forty feet away, in a nook filled with lime-coloured weed. Two men and a woman, dressed in the frumpiest clothes, regarded the bloodthirsty scene with interest. The horses, weirdly, had heavy antlers. They gave one or two innocuous snorts but were generally silent. They calmly trotted over. Spencer looked pensive and zipped the bayonet away as if in a honed parade gesture.

"You are Holden?", said one of the riders, a deeply muscular man with thick black hair.

"Hi", said Holden.

"My gang found the downed Dalek ship a ways off. Looks like a lucky escape for everyone. Pugo, my friend, is looking after your sister and the baby".

"That's good", breathed Holden. He blinked and fingered away at his ribs, as if he had all the time in the world. To his right, Harharman's tentacles rippled slightly. "And who are you guys, if you don't mind me asking?"

"We're just a family of farmers", said the muscular man, enthusiastically because he knew that soon the newcomers would be someone else's problem. "But I suppose you're all from the past, or the future, and you must have a whole heap of questioes. I know I would. Just relax".

The third man in the party, all frazzled brown hair, volunteered, "I have the Dalek carrier".

He alighted and collapsed out a heavy-duty flowbox. To Harharman he said amiably, "Come with us and we'll deliver you to the City of Silver and Platinum". The Dalek gave no reply, perhaps a regal silence that implied 'yes'. The farmer eased him free from the tank cavity and put him in the box. He then carried it over to the muscular man and strapped it into his saddle, a protective spot between the rider's abdomen and the horse's neck.

Elliott Spencer, for all his other mysterious qualities, was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve. Throughout the fine, Samaritan action, he barely hid his displeasure.

"So you are the lackeys of these creatures?", he sneered.

The riders were jocular. Said the woman, "Lackeys? We're not really political around here. You should know: in this day and age, it would be as odd as a black gentleman thinking he's a slave for being in the same room as a white gentleman. It's all relative. And all I'd say is that it all works out neatly, in history. We co-operate, and it all works out".

"We just saw these things decimate our city!", said Holden.

One of the male farmers seemed belligerent, in a twee kind of way. "All civilisations have periods where they're barbaric. All that matters is the good will of the here and now".

Spencer smiled, quite humourlessly. The woman bounced in her saddle slightly. "Look, what I always say: if you're a Christian, it makes sense. My parents were Christians, and they were around in an age when there was still a lot of animosity between us and the Daleks. Jesus said, 'Love your enemy', and no one ever understood it -"

This slight but all-important history lesson - Holden lazily picked out the backbone, where he knew he should be gratefully digesting each and every word. To a greater degree, he stared at the woman's breasts, there, larger than life beneath the heavy woollen jumper.

"I take it you guys know the Bible? 'Love thy enemy'. Why would anyone say such a thing, that goes in the face of all human motivations, all human survival traits? No one understood it at the time. But seeing the way my parents doted over that book, I realised: it predicted exactly our modern day of mass time-travel; the cross- polinistation of present-day peoples with peoples from the far-future. Goodness will out, in time. All civilisations become more benevolent as time goes on; antagonism just dies out naturally. The Daleks that brought you here were evil, I suppose. But this planet is where they start to become good".

"This is a nice speech", Spencer spat out the words. "You've made it several times before, I think".

The farmers shifted uneasily. Trying to alleviate the tension, the smaller of the men held up his hands in a very twentieth century gesture of placation. "Look, we live our lives separately from the Daleks, anyway. I'm sorry about everything you've been through. Get on the back of our horses. We'll meet up with your sis, while -", he checked the plan with his colleague, "—Brezhnev delivers the Dalek to the city?"

Brezhnev nodded.

Only partially by design, Holden lightened the atmosphere by saying in a plaintive tone, "I've never ridden a horse before".

The girl in particular laughed. "It's O.K. Just hold tight".

"I always wanted to. I always wanted to work on a ranch", he qualified.

Climbing on beside her, taking off at quite a gallop, he felt tired, and also feverishly alive. The same old matter of whether this girl would finally be the one to take his virginity -it was there, but it faded out more quickly than usual. In any case, they arrived at the people's homestead and the woman was greeted by her boyfriend. Holden walked airily among the wooden buildings. Pheobe rushed from a dark little house: she beamed and protruded her neck. Obviously she wanted a hug, except the baby was now resident in her arms for always.

"Oh Holden, what's going on?"

He enjoyed the fact that it was a rhetorical question, a matter of surging exasperation and nothing more.

"Hell if I know", he frowned, then frowned good-naturedly at the gurgling baby. It was only slightly bigger than the Dalek pilot, craggier skin, infinitely more animated, like free-jazz to some old Beethoven symphony. "These folks say we've got nothing to fear from the aliens once they get here. That once they get here, they become more enlightened somehow".

Jiggling the baby, Pheobe was blatantly unconvinced. Since when had she gotten to be more sensitive to phonies than him?

She calmly swivelled her heels, Mr Baby being braced by night-time atmosphere as he swished at right angles. "You think it's safe to stay here?"

Holden stared at the baby, the night sky and the deep-blue outline of ye olde houses. "Yeah". Thinking, first the bullies attack you, then they get philosophically insidious and you can't touch them. When in Rome, as if we've ever been anywhere else. Burning.

There was quite a bit of activity between the out-buildings, considering it was surely extremely late at night by now. People swirled and made decisive turns, and Holden quickly realised they were all tacitly reacting to a short ginger-haired man who looked Turkish or Hawaiian. Whether he was actually the boss or not, it hardly mattered; he was respected. He sidled forward and started to converse with Captain Spencer. Holden and Pheobe joined, and the man simply spoke on, but careful to look earnestly into their eyes too.

"You've got questioes, and concerns, I know that. But from what I've heard, you've been in non-stop danger for some time now; I'll take you to our spare little lodge, and you can settle down. We'll talk as we go".

The lodge flanked the side of a pretty little ridge, and was partially logs, partially plaster, partially Pennsylvania-style slats. As Holden was shown around, the tiredness in his legs was a constant source of shame, and he felt like a mere shadow beside Pheobe, not that she asked any more questions than he would have. The strange and elongated history of the Daleks –what a thing.

Soon it was if they were consciously waiting for sleep to come in order to clarify the situation. That this was in fact the Earth, Planet of the Apes style, the sum of the human race having fitted in seamlessly alongside the invaders? Wait for sleep's opinion. That 'they're different creatures now -once they're free of their Dalek suits. They almost look like us'. Wait for sleep's opinion. And that 'You'd be afraid of the soldiers of almost any civilisation. The civilians are different, easier-going -'. Wait for sleep's opinion. And to a lesser extent, God's.

The place had a sitting room, and a bedroom. Spencer stripped free of his braces almost as soon as they entered the little room and sat primly on the cacky rosewood settee. He said, "I'll sleep here. It's almost but not quite like home", in a well-measured baritone.

The baby had just started to take run-ups to a long, committed whine. Said Pheobe, "I should apologise in advance if he cries in the night".

Spencer touched the baby's skull, ponderous but with a vital level of warmth completely removed, replaced by inhuman wonder. "I plan to meditate anyway. A crying baby is just something to be attuned with. Goodnight, Pheobe. Goodnight, Holden".

Brother, Sister, adoptee -removed behind the weirdly thick door, to find irony -no tears from within the swaddling, but plenty from Pheobe. Holden hugged her awkwardly. Their hugs were never quite the same, now that they were both adults.

"Everything's going to work out", he said consolingly. "We're survivors. These guys here are obviously good people. We'll be in our element, believe it".

Perhaps she even assimilated these words, as she reversed slowly onto the bed, a picture of creaky, exhausted limbs. Later on, Holden would notice that she'd taken the bed that was far smaller than his, and he'd just let it happen like Mr Inconsiderate. As a parting gambit before the Opinion of Sleep, he tried a soothing promise, "You'll see. We're going to live long and rich lives here. We're going to be free".

Long and rich lives. End of Week One; they rode to the outskirts of the City of Silver and Platinum, their guide Kosygin wincing at how these newcomers were living in fear of something he'd known his whole life. Sure enough, however, fear fell away. They each peered through Spencer's unbelievably fortuitous field glasses at the bustling city. Humanoids, just smaller than the average height of Holden's era, moved at speed between the bold new architecture. Kosygin had explained earlier how the creatures inside the Dalek battle-tanks were only a small section of the entire civilisation, that once they arrived on this planet, they were genetically re-engineered back to their original bipedal state. Or -as much as was possible with their level of medical technology. Just a few Dalek-octopus traits remained. The most glaring of which was that one side of their skulls was enlarged, with a single eye significantly larger than the other. "Not very symmetrical", noted Holden. "How come that doesn't totally unnerve them when they look in the mirror?"

"Perhaps it'll grow out", shrugged Pheobe. And they stared down at Baby John, happy and with roving eyes, hardly ever wailing as newborns are wont.

Long and rich lives. Three weeks in. It started as a discussion between Holden and Spencer at how much they hated the weak stew that was served at the farm every third day. Holden mentioned again that he'd always thought of becoming a farmer himself. Oh, not out of any real love of the lifestyle, but because it was honest, simple work and all the bourgeois phonies just had to let you get on with it.

Spencer's puckered smile; small but sage. "Then we shall be farmers", he said, and went on to speak of the strange, woolly cows that were kept by the hundred-load in far pastures. Obviously their hosts would be willing to donate a few, plus some chickenoids and a herding dog. They could build a house using timber from the nearby woods, the trees from which were a variety of light-but-durable oak. Spencer flexed his steady hands in front of him, promising that he still had the reflexes to saw and hammer - left over from the digging of trenches, tunnels and barricades at the Western Front.

Later that evening, between their excitable dreams of farm-building:

"In the seventies, all we ever hear about the First World War is the time when everybody stopped fighting on Christmas Eve and the English and the Germans went out into no-man's-land and played soccer together. Did that really happen?"

Spencer remained silent for a moment, and Holden feared he might have brought back too many bad memories for him, or somehow made light of it, made him too tense at being a man-out-of-time.

Spencer eventually broke the reverie in a low and regal voice. Spread his palms on the weak wooden table, turned his eyes to terrible, glassy ovals. "It happened -as a surprise for all of us. Men deciding to smile and breeze forth, no one quite understanding why. The smiles flowering and relaxing across their faces, just as facial muscles lose their tautness when one drowns in the ocean -leaving astonished and innocent smiles. I watched from the gun turrets as family photos were studied and appraised as a matter of world-shaking aesthetic intrigue. I saw card games being dealt with superhumanly swift and relaxed flicks of the wrist. The men played for liquorice and sugar cubes.

"This -brief little dalliance- I opposed it from the start. How could one see this faux-peace as anything other than hypocrisy? Given that as soon this strange sequence of days was complete, we would return to relentlessly slicing each other, choking each other with mustard gas, mowing each other down with rail-guns that could rival the speed and precision of human thought itself? The hypocrisy clung to my heart like a cold vice".

Holden said, "So what? You didn't meet up with any Germans?"

Spencer breathed the words as small catharsis, "I went away to my staff room and I meditated. Alone. Happy. There is no point drawing up quaint little images of universal peace if they're mired in a world of universal suffering".

"I guess not", Holden tried to sound thoughtful; after a few moments realising that Spencer's tone really had bled into him that queasy conception of gleeful, nihilistic war.

Long and rich lives. Two months in. A small convoy of carts delivered the requisite timbers to the savannah they'd selected on one of the further plains. They'd not quite chosen it at random: there were signs of a previous farm from long ago, possibly from before the Fall of Earth. Disintegrated sheaves of corrugated iron, now as flakey as paint-crust, led the way to spider-strutted towers, obviously the zombie skeletons of a watertower and windmill. Equally artistic was the vast collection of collapsed two-by-fours, in places as dense as a bonfire, in other spots with just a few higgledy beams clinging together wigwam style. It was only once Holden and Spencer started to haul away the timbers that the excitement came, all at once; a trap door. A conspicuously flat surface extenuated by a matte wash of sand, and how the sun blazed down on it as surely as the distant cream mountains.

There was a deadbolt set in a rotating hand-lock, though time had somehow weakened the mechanism, allowing them to lever through it with breathtaking ease. Within was a treasure trove of food. Holden had seen such a store a couple of times before, back in his own era, in the dells and bunkers his aunts and uncles had prepared for the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was a reassuring selection of primary food-stuffs, canned, all squared-up in supermarket shinkwrap. There was also a surprisingly large amount of space devoted to treats: sugared, condensed milk, luxury fruit, golden syrup, lavender scented heating oil.

"There you go! We will have mini-bites this Christmas", said Holden, "and a couple of Christmasses beyond".

To which Spencer gave a deep harrumphing noise.

The bunker was a reassuring place. It was also far too still and eerie, to do with an uncomfortable but necessary gift from God. Holden was unnerved by the way it was clean, generic-looking, as if the centuries-dead builders had made it specifically for them - a group of disparate strangers fallen from the sky. Painfully aware of the bright, empty corners. Somehow the ambience wasn't helped by a single child's water pistol which had been left atop a chest of tinned sausages.

Long and rich lives. The construction of their farm compound was easy. Or rather, it felt easy, in philosophical terms. For Holden, a happy convergence of throbbing muscles, blistered hands and sun-dizzied eyes marked one of the most tranquil periods of his life. There was no doubt that he was a glaringly amateurish construction worker, yet Spencer was kind enough to look down on him with bonhomie. Spencer and the satin sun both, always tangible, always delivering weird geometries of light from those colourful clouds.

Out on a sparse section of ultra-flat ground, the farmhouse itself was near complete before they knew it. It was the bright and showy end of autumn. They'd been working on the lattice of the roof all day, the sunlight seeming to ebb into Holden's joints to empower him with his shining steel hammer. If only his mind hadn't been elsewhere from the moment he'd sprang from bed that morning. It had been eight months since they'd fallen from the sky. Time had moved in a great silky rush. Only recently did he remember the unearthly fascination he'd felt on seeing the coloured spheres that first day, from hundreds of feet in the air, then as peculiar giants on the far horizon. Red, Yellow, Blue. Empirically, they were all primary coloured, he supposed -yet they prompted you immediately to try and think of any non-glowing objects which ever matched the visceral and eye-grabbing power. If the sun was dying, and simultaneously colouring itself in a more playful shade of yellow, perhaps. And as for the green. It was beautiful, and pure, and it kow-towed to humans on a kindly whim alone.

None of the human tribes knew quite why their ancestors had made the spheres. The only undisputed piece of information was that they predated the Dalek time-invasion. 'Conspiracy theories' abounded, mainly variations on the idea that they'd been built by Dalek sleeper agents within the world government as a way of exacerbating the invasion. They were so beautiful and innocent looking that Holden had trouble believing this. Disregarding the spheres in a forward-looking harshness, however, was Spencer. Holden had to nag him to accompany him and Pheobe the five miles from their fledgling farm. To stand beneath them. It would be a purely peaceful and artistic thing, he promised.

And the time was upon them. Spencer agreed that they'd ride out to the spheres after the day's construction work was finished. If only Holden didn't suddenly feel irritated by any interruption at the near-completion of the farm. If only he wasn't suddenly getting a cold, his sinuses burning with the odour of acidy blood. He knew he couldn't change his mind now; the lack of comfort would just have to be ignored. They rode the cart at a sub-gallop due to the presence of teething Baby John, not that he ever cried or even lost his joyous repose. Pheobe stared excitedly at the beautiful giants on the horizon. A mile or so of grabby, scratchy black foliage, even from that distance with a certain amount of spicey coloured light playing on the ground.

Contending with the lapping rainbow colours, moving slowly between midnight-friendly purple into red and yellow, they also had to get to grips with the mighty support rods which held each sphere twenty or thirty feet in the air. No kind of twentieth century metal could hold such a weight. Holden admitted to a pleasing, worrying vertigo. Growing up in New York and dealing with vast overhead structures from age zero -this was on a different scale altogether. From Pheobe's arms, Baby John eyed the luscious shades of air and took them all in with wonder. Plus the grey dust at their feet; you couldn't have found a finer, more pleasing kind of dust even on the moon. A moon haunted by colour; indulged by the exotic light, making everything so intensely hypnotic. The air drifted. Time elongated to allow extra musing on the part of the humans. Spencer: harsh and preoccupied as he paced around the metal poles, though the hypno-light's effect on brain hemispheres –no one was really accountable for how they thought, how they brooded. Not here.

Holden walked around in a dream, incredibly light on his feet. He cursed the sudden cold that was hitching up in his sinuses and making his head swim. It wasn't far off from making him delirious, taking every ounce of practical strength in his limbs and re-routing it into weird meditation. He walked in a circle; winced upwards at the joyous light ebbing away into the submissive sky. The sound of their heavy work boots clumping dust. Red, blue and green light where there should be shadows -

Pheobe gasped as a stream of lightning blinked out from one of the spheres and arched into the dust. There was a moment of panic, mixed with deep silence –as a second lighting strike forked downwards from above, this time hitting Spencer squarely between the shoulders. He jumped, though it was a gentle motion. Even as the first current crackled away, several smaller branches leapt out and played at his torso. He smiled, a promise that it was all quite painless. Obviously it was that old high school science-class experiment which teased electricity into a loving pet - Mr Snellgrave's hair standing out crazily with each tiny current. In barely a minute or two, the avenue of giant spheres and all that lay beneath was engulfed in dancing tendrils of fine blue energy. Spencer smiled slightly. Pheobe extended her free hand to allow the crackles to arch and ripple on her fingertips. Baby John –aware of it all and relaxed. Oh, that the place had just been designed as a Fourth of July parade, a birthday party or Christmas carnival.

Holden had often wondered why his nervous breakdowns had simply petered out. The suave and sophisticated psychiatrists his parents employed would have him believe he'd made 'progress'. But himself, he wasn't so sure. Maybe if it had just been exasperation at getting through Pencey, they'd have a point. But the feeling that he was trapped in such a careless, selfish society –eternal, invincible. It was exactly the way people got to be schizophrenic.

He looked up between the spheres, tortured. The others smiled and played around in the passive forks of lightning. Holden alone saw the two angels towering above the spheres, glaring down at him with intensely judgmental eyes. The feathers of their wings and their smooth, careless shoulders shone away without ever becoming too differentiated from the night sky. Because nothing was real. Because obviously they were all dead and serving purgatory in the netherworld. Aliens don't exist, and if they did, they certainly wouldn't bother invading crummy Planet Earth. This new place; it was an interesting experience, but becoming ever less interesting as the months went on.

Each day, like clockwork, Holden would finish his sundry farm duties and eat dinner with Pheobe and Spencer, each of them marginally tired, never once frazzled. The polished wooden dining table, liberated from a Dalek scrap yard, had a varnish which refracted upwards the evening sunlight. The diners, from the slant of light in their eyes, looking utterly fearless. They spoke of what life must be like in the Dalek city. Brethren farmers spoke dispassionately about going to the cinemas, going to markets, running their children to and from the sickly-bustling inter-racial schools. Pheobe would frequently reflect on how crazy it was that the first time they met the Daleks, they'd tried to eradicate humankind en masse, but now they were quite happy to coexist. It was the craziest thing, in her opinion.

"It was never the same in our time", she practically laughed as she took their dishes to the sink. "Bingo, you had Martin Luther King. Bingo, you had the frontier settlers doing their level best to conquer the Native Americans, then Brando took that squaw to the Oscars. You had bitter enemies suddenly becoming friends, but it was like society or history would still never let you forget how unfair it was. With the Daleks and us, though, they don't even feel guilty".

Spencer sat up straight in his chair. "Ah, Pheobe. Guilt doesn't enter in to it. And why would we want it to? I don't care what goes on in other people's heads. Besides, prejudice and racial hatred –these are easy characteristics to own up to. I didn't particularly like Orientals, but this was only due to a few random occurrences and misconceptions. I can happily admit that I was wrong. But the real shame the Daleks carry with them, and which they'll never admit to, is their wretched laziness. Their cities have all been built. All they need is their food and a few menial production tasks, which we humans 'willingly' provide for them. So let them hate us, love us, be indifferent to us. It makes no difference. Laziness is the ultimate shame, and it goes unspoken. That the nobility of a feudal society will prevail, this is probably all we can hope for".

And anyway, could you really call yourself a persecuted underclass if you slowly got used to the drudgery, if you found a certain kind of contentment in the nine-to-five prison? At least twice a week, they'd venture into one of the Dalek cities and there was much to be recommended in terms of entertainment. Perhaps if you only went to the Daleks for entertainment, there was no real problem at all. One of their neighbouring human farmers would look after Toddler John while Holden and Pheobe would go to a holo-show, a nightclub or stand-up venue. There was a fairly rich culture, at least as rich as Earth's, except there was no getting away from it -the elephant in the room- the fact that none of the Daleks did any manual work at all, leaving it all to the humans with their provincial factories and farms. The sense of social doom was both subtle and gross, but it was always there. Fat housewife Daleks abounded. Yuppie business Daleks, their tacit male whores, to a lesser degree. Even this decadence was understandable, in way. Holden would squint, and in a way, it was natural -people pushing their decadence as far as they could, the same way you saw kids testing their limits with a no-idea parent.

But the teenage Daleks. Nothing could forgive them. They were everywhere in the cities and they were laziness and horror incarnate. A society-destroying arrogance bomb that was perpetually exploding. Still, Holden could avoid them, if narrowly.

Frequenting the smallest cinemas and the post-modernly neon comedy clubs -the ones that catered for anyone with a ticking mind (actual comedy optional)- was a good way of killing time. In the Stroud club, exactly two years after planet-fall and once life on the farm had become wondrously routine, he would drink his evenings away with an alien equivalent of scotch, each shot glass drying out his insides in the most pleasing and self-destructive way. The Dalek comedians, to a man, were mediocre. He'd watch their needy, flickering smiles and it at least gave their phoney observations a kind of pathos. Alien scotch, dry me out. Dry me out until I become wise. As he sat in the balcony of the many-sided lounge bar, often drooping over the edge and holding his mighty bottle of liquor as if it was glued into his grasp.

With confidence, he'd send his heckles into battle as if they were torso-spinning, hammer-wielding gladiators. There was never any security in the clubs, and often the comedian would indulge him in a good-natured dialogue.

Nick Comedian-face: "Have you noticed, people are still very frightened of speed cameras? They look at them like poor, leather-waistcoat-wearing villagers might look at a slumbering giant in a fairy tale".

Nick Comedian-face demonstrated the driver's wild, haunted stare and the audience laughed along lightly. Unfortunately, the laughter trailed off to an abrupt silence, giving Holden the chance to say in a skillfully harsh voice, "I HATE THAT" -in some quarters of the audience getting him a bigger laugh than the comedian.

"It's a terrible thing", Nick Comedian-face conceded in a gentle breath. "And -"

"I hate it so much, I was standing on the edge of a precipice just thinking about it, and some people saw the look on my face and thought I was going to jump. I said no. I was simply thinking about speed cameras".

Holden noticed that of the nearby people laughing at him, the person laughing hardest was a beautiful Dalek girl with short black hair, tight at her temples in a way that was both old-fashioned and completely unashamed of the badly-evolved cranium. On the whole her skin was smooth and pleasingly bright, translucent, pliant, especially around that knock-out smile. This Holden appraised in the space of a split second, then continued the assault.

Said Comedian-face, "Yeah. Suicide, they say it's the coward's way out. Surely that's the M-34 in Cotley? Up there on the high-road, the traffic wardens eyeing you like mustachoed bandits above a ravine, drawing a bead on you with the congestion charge, and you're like, 'Ha! M-34. Running the gauntlet, you can't touch me, gringo!'"

"That allegory is so precise. It's perfect. It's pure", said Holden with faux melodrama.

"Thankyou", Nick leaned forward at his mike, just beginning to seem icy.

"We're living in a house of ideas, and you're painting that house green, and blue, and yellow, and red, and all the colours you can imagine", Holden gestured at this wondrous transcendence by swinging his liquor bottle.

The comedy clubs hardly ever had any security, but there was sometimes a manager or a ticket booth monkey who'd come up and try to settle him. On this occasion it was a heavy-set Dalek man with a shoulder-padded suit, who Holden took to be Nick's manager. "Good heckles, but if you dislike it so much, you should probably just walk out".

Holden frowned testily. "Who says I dislike it? Life is interactive, that's all".

"This sort of humour is not for everyone", said the man reasonably. "Who's to say if it's good or bad? Part of what makes it funny is just that it's a performance".

"O.K. Just settle down", said Holden. He tried to watch the foolish comedian once more.

The heavy-set man moved to place a light little hand on Holden's side, prompting him to brandish his waterpistol. "Ay! Back off, Popeye!"

The girl laughed joyously at this, just as Holden's reign was coming to an end -he felt it was time to move on and left the club with good grace. In a little avenue of council offices, he paused to look in the night-steaming river at the ducks. He wondered why they weren't asleep yet. Obviously something had upset them. The look in their eyes was unashamedly bright and existential. Circling back towards the block with the comedy club, he called into the grubby one-stop to buy some chips. The pretty Dalek girl browsing candy, as large as life and twice as unexpected.

"That was pretty funny. You should be a stand-up yourself", she suggested.

"No way", Holden shyly shook his head. "Stand-ups are pretty phoney when you think about it. They're like novelists who can't think of anything serious to say. My brother was a big-time novelist. One of the biggest".

"Are you going write one as well? You seem pretty intense; I'd be interested to read it".

The girl selected the alienesque equivalent of a Turkish Delight and processed to the counter. Holden picked up some spicey cheeze chips, almost at random, and ambled numbly behind. Outside, "Walk me home if you like", and he blushed. Nothing could prevent the awesome impetus to speak from the heart, though.

"It's different now", he smiled boyishly. "Back where I come from -in the past, 1973 AD- it was like you could write about something, find something interesting to say, even if that thing was boring. Now it's the Dalek's world, it's like everything is running down".

"I'm pretty boring myself", said the girl.

"Well, I don't know about that", promised Holden.

Back at Evashavi's flat, the question of Dalek anatomy was resolved once and for all, and they fell into a quarter-of-an-hour block of calm, considered love-making. Afterwards, Holden felt a funny kind of warmth around his eyes, at first a threat of tears, then coming through as a weird, internal substitute for crying. From the start, God knew, from the start -they were like chalk and cheese. Similarly, though, God couldn't have denied they were caught up in a love-delusion that was bigger than both of them. Within barely three months, a blueprint of bitter, soul-denying rows had formed between them -interesting, however, that whenever Holden tried to think back, he couldn't remember exactly when or where the first argument had taken place. The first mishap? Outside the one-stop, he'd introduced himself as 'Jimmy Corrigan', inventing the name on the spot and just for the hell of it. Only after the love-making had he felt the need to confess -alas, too late, with Evashavi keeping 'Corrigan' as a nick-name for him. Why had he said it? 'Jimmy' was a good name, but 'Corrigan' sounded somehow neurotic, and yet would she stop using it?

In a way it seemed natural. He'd never known a longstanding couple who were entirely happy. In his mind, even the prim-smiled, toddy-dispensing Mrs Antolini had to contend with the creeping implication that Mr Antolini was a secret and perfectly sinister homosexual. Thought Holden: love by its nature is the ultimate secret. Who are we to complain when that secret is suddenly found to involve, say, a bitter row every other weekend, or you beau's wild irritation at how you wear your hunting cap indoors.

Doubtless it was the same old problem; finding ways to tread water and not become insanely irritated by the things that came your way. Some nights, Evashavi would be called to work late in her bureaucratic estate agent job, and Holden would feel obligated to spend this odd night of freedom in some kind of meaningful way. Only, whether to go into the Dalek city and partake of some kind of slavering bar talk, or whether to just take his rifle into the prairie and shoot whatever bold little objects took his fancy? The city was par for the course, with flat building frontages that swamped your desire to explore. Flipside, the desert was a strangely underwhelming cathedral. The stars were fairly bright both directly overhead and at the far horizon, occasionally pestered by a gaudy space-ship or an errant advertising beam from the city. Sometimes, around the middle of the year when the animals were scattered in diverse sections of their savannah, Holden would assist in rounding them up for the evening. To begin with, this was solid, satisfying work, and Holden was constantly entertained by Groucho Marx, 'I could speak with you until the cows come home. Then again, why don't you go home and I speak with the cows?'

Inevitably he grew listless. The cows always seemed to have such desperate eyes, and he couldn't figure out why. The day of the big find -he was hanging back, staring at the ugly, stupid ridge which separated the central pasture from the northernmost fields. There was the ruin of a little house, which was really nothing more than some 'v' shaped slabs of plaster and the yawning lattice of a collapsed roof. It was impossibly old and overgrown; it fascinated him all the same. He'd often reflected that the place was too small to have a secret cellar like that glorious discovery of year one. Only now did he find himself staring absent-mindedly at the narrow little planks extending forlornly into the desert, thinking, 'floorboards'.

He swung in through the tight little doorway and moved awkwardly between the tangles of foliage. A son-of-bitch bat flew out of the darkest corner and he heard himself yell, 'ya-hhaa-ha', as if it was important to enunciate the sound as a word. He moved in the direction the bat had come from, paying close attention to any slight hollow sound which cricked up from his heels. And eventually, by a window, there it was: a very musical 'tonk', 'tonk'.

Using his hunting knife, he delicately prized up the loosest and most vulnerable floorboard. It was only some kind of pine, but time and dampness had solidified it like heavy rubber. The effort was quite severe, and he expected to see nothing, or to stick his head down into a horrible black crawl-space. Instead, straight away, there was the edge of a polythene bag, wrapped tightly around something tantalisingly solid. Impatience ruled; he twisted his wrist in the most impractical way and laboriously angled the bag until it came up cleanly.

Within the bag -even before he'd properly unwrapped the dirty plastic, he could see -the edge of that world-famous logo, plus a tantalising sliver of naked skin. Playboy. A dozen Playboy special editions, and how do you like that? Slipping back against the cacky wall, he forgot all about the darkness of the house and the risk of bats.

Dating from between 2009 and 2011 (such ridiculously futuristic dates), the magazines were a source of wonder. Getting to know Bethanie Badertscher with her Jackie Kennedy eyes, the ambassador's errant daughter Lexi Ray, transcendentally Scottish Aspen MacKensie, he said only one thing:

"Happy Christmas, boy".

The magazines fitted precisely in his saddlebag. As he retrieved his hand, he just couldn't resist and took one more look at the topmost magazine. Playboy's Summer Girls, August 2011 (lord, he'd be 78!): the soul-probing, shoulder-tensing Kimberly Phillips. It was funny, a small part of his mind drunkenly reflected how most of the women were smiling, and previously this was something which had always bothered him about jazz mags. If you were about to make love to a girl, it would be seriously unnerving if she was smiling so hard. The only thing that could quite explain it was if you were soul-mates having recently arrived in Heaven, and were ecstatically happy.

He stared down at Kimberly and angled his head quite poignantly. She was surely all his Christmasses come at once, and with those never-pouting eyes insisting, 'anticipation is everything'.

'_Holden_', said a ragged male voice.

He pounced to slip the magazine back in his saddle bag, but smoothly, not so quick as to risk ruffled pages.

_'Holden, can you hear me_?'

He turned around, and even as he did so knew that he'd see only empty desert, the voice purely in his head. Certainly it was puzzling; he'd always assumed that schizophrenics heard their voices only in times of stress. Staring at Kimberly, he'd felt more relaxed than he'd been in years.

In any case, he replied, because he was curious. "This is Holden. Who are you?"

The voice seemed to come from somewhere very close behind his right ear. Miraculously he found the will-power to avoid spinning around like a dog chasing his tail.

"_I have an important mission for you_", said the deep voice.

Holden thought about this. "Yeah?"

"_I'm not yet ready to appear to you. You'll sense when the time is right. Use this phrase to summon me, 'Who's there? Knock, knock'_".

"O.K, but..."

Life became increasingly haunted, and secrets buzzed around them with a flourish. That and the horror. Four or five months into their dalliance, Holden and Evashavi had taken to arriving back at the farm a quarter of an hour shy of midnight, the better to make love in the pleasant little window between today and tomorrow. Always they were drunk. For good-time-girl Evashavi this was a way of life, for Holden -admittedly, it let him think a little more straight, but then again, there was now a ceiling beyond which his thoughts couldn't go.

They drifted into the avenue of farm-buildings, whisky-addled brains noting every slight nuance of the starkly-moonlit walls. Evashavi was incapable of speaking quietly, but this didn't matter so much. Passing by John's adobe-bricked dwellings, Holden reflected that, now a fully-grown twenty-one year old, he got as exhausted as any of the other farm hands - shy a saucer-crash, nothing would wake him. A greater risk came in Evashavi catching a glimpse of Elliot. A few days ago, he'd shaved his head as a form of defence against the ticks and lice which infested their cows. Obviously, if city-girl Evashavi thought there was any kind of tiny parasite within fifty feet of her, she'd never return.

As a further way of distracting her, keeping her single-mindedness off guard, he would have liked to have seized her spine and extracted a wild, passionate kiss. Except Evashavi 'didn't like kissing, except in bed'. And so they sloped and loped along the enclosed cottage walls, in daylight sobriety such a quick and easy route, now a weird, gleaming trench. Tingling legs marked him out as well-and-truly drunk; not that Holden reached out for Evashavi's waist with anything other than up-tight determination. A pinch to the back of his hand left him lolling his head at the purple desert. At some point, he overtook his wife and reached the door a long time before her. Turning the badly-forged handle was almost a part of the love making. His legs swung low as he entered, against the explicit orders of the highly disciplined part of his mind which still believed itself to be sober. Something about the shape of the wall directly above the door, the angle of the shadows, disturbed him. He dismissed this, swung his legs towards the bed, froze -and was made instantly sober by surprise.

It was Elliott's room, and far from being asleep even at this late hour, he was meditating. Every now and again, he mentioned in passing his meditation -but Holden could never have guessed in a thousand years it involved this. He was sitting in the lotus, as was traditional. His hands rested on his knees in a pursed imitation of springtime buds. Surely, what he'd done to his body, however -was in no way natural. On the broad muscles of his shoulders, he'd inserted dozens of five-inch masonry nails. The blood had poured mightily and had dried to a marble-like sheen. The surrounding musculature -vividly empowered by pain.

Holden could only tense, retracing his steps in a way that was almost comical. Elliott was sitting with his back to the door, which was the greatest saving grace he could have hoped for. He even entertained the idea that he'd been unobserved. Outside in the dust, he bumped into the advancing Evashavi and spun her around dramatically. She laughed and was swept along, all the way to his room, where he was flatly unable to perform and unwilling to explain why.

Saying, in her beautiful, unconsciously-attention-grabbing voice,"What's the matter? Did you catch him masturbating? It's only natural".

So Elliot was insane. He had been insane for some time, and outside of time, and now in the far future. His madness was as elaborate as human ennui itself. Almost overnight, and for some reason particularly while staring at the sixty-mile distant mountains beyond the city, Holden formed the opinion that it was all perfectly O.K. Firstly, because it was something that could at least partially excuse his own burgeoning craziness. Also, how could they not be insane after all they'd been through? Childish memories of the great mystery; why the battle-suited Invader-Daleks had been unable to 'exterminate' them as they'd done with most of the other humans.

"_You were kept alive by the Grace of God_", said the voice in Holden's head, not quite from the direction of the distant mountains.

He replied without thinking. "That doesn't make any sense to me, I swear. You say we were kept alive by the Grace of God, yet here we are as slaves to the Daleks in all but name. What's graceful about that?"

The voice made no reply. There was barely even a breeze, as Holden glared impatiently at the distant turquoise crags.

Around rolled his and Evashavi's third wedding anniversary, and Holden felt nervous in a way he really didn't need. He often bought Evashavi presents anyway, which she was overjoyed with for half an hour or so, before becoming lukewarm and noncommittal. For his first anniversary, he'd gone to an antique shop in the City of Silver and Steel and bought her a wealth of mini-records -Johnny Cash, Dean Martin, Patsy Cline, Ella Fitzgerald and Elvis Presley, together with a weird, laser-powered record-deck to play them on. It was bad enough that the antique shop owner had greeted him with such incredulity, practically giving him the records for free as an alternative to throwing them away. It was possible, just, that someone might dislike Ella Fitzgerald, he thought -but who could ever dislike Elvis Presley? Especially considering the childishly shrill and a-tonal nature of Dalek music?

At the afternoon herd-master handover, Holden greeted Elliott with an exhausted smile.

"You want to go to the city and pick up an anniversary gift for my wife? Myself, I've got no idea".

Elliott delivered a different kind of exhausted smile. Anyone else, thought Holden, would probably see it as smug aggrandisement. With a knowledge of all the man had been through, however: the deconstruction and reassembly of innocence. Involving pain? Ah, but how could you ever ignore it.

"This close to Christmas", said Elliott, bolt upright even as his horse staggered, "why not combine her gifts?"

Holden shrugged. "Yeah, but you know they don't celebrate Christmas".

"Of course not". He said quietly, "Get her something pleasant".

Holden took his tired horse to the stables and unsaddled him quite slowly. Showering, putting on his city clothes, he was still reluctant to hug Pheobe because the somehow-feeling of grubby hard work stayed on at full force. As for John, he wanted to clasp his slender adult shoulders and tell him he was proud of him, even if such gestures were phoney.

Reporting to the bus stop on a semi-distant lane, he felt absolutely mired. It was the last place he wanted to be and the last thing he wanted to be doing. Hellish Dalek busses, overused and underused, but always with the spectre of some gaudy passengers to kick up your senses. This time, the thing was more or less empty. He took a seat just below the 'king's balcony' section, vulnerable though it was. Gradually he made out the words 'Cum is white' which had been scratched across the window in something like fifty-point. It was astonishing. The child had sat and laboriously scratched 'Cum is white', despite the fact that a close-circuit TV sphere was barely a three feet away.

The city, in the afternoon, was not particularly crowded. The shops had spacious, secluded isles, which he was grateful to saunter through. In Arogas, he felt the weird, almost hysterical power of his twenty-thousand Dalekredits and wondered how it was that there was a recession, when he'd amassed so much just through hard, manual work. To be splashing out like this, it should feel like social benevolence or social redressing. Finally, when he bought the 400 Dalekredits voucher for an anti-grav-pod ride across the great forests -he actually felt nothing. Nothing for himself, Evashavi, the Dalek economy.

Two and a half hours after he'd been dropped off, the same friendly-scowling human driver in the same bus picked him up once again. More than anything, he wanted to tip the man, though he soon realised this would be terribly heavy-handed. It being so close to Christmas, he figured he could have got away with absent-mindedly giving him a bottle of whisky from a shopping bag -if only he'd had the presence of mind to set it all up beforehand. The bright, orange-coloured bus, made oppressively slack-jawed by 'cum is white', was now hatefully crowded to boot. Holden would have preferred to take one of the undesirable and viewless front seats, merely because they were far-removed from the Dalek teenagers. But there was only one free seat, directly in the heart of the horror. He took it-

Ten, perhaps twenty minutes, saw Holden and the other human bluecollars trying to ignore the a-tonal musak being emitted by a sour-faced Daleknt teenager. Time blurred; the human passengers presently performed neurotic philosophical somersaults, now trying to ignore the fact that the musak could _not_ be ignored. Also, after having tolerated it for so long, whoever spoke up now would seem horribly weak. Nevertheless, an old caretaker-like man boldly nominated himself.

"Excuse me, this is a public place. Would you mind turning your music off?"

Ugly silence came in force. Like some overly-intellectual black magician trying to perceive the tiny flaws in tone made in a junior's invocation, Holden hunted for weaknesses in the way the old man handled himself. There was a lack of honesty for one thing. That equal to the annoyance of the musak, there was the great truth that society was allowing its teenagers to act in whatever gaudy way they liked while Rome burned. Personally, he would have used fighting-talk, as bright and breezey as the air; 'Would you mind turning your music off, ya fat waste of space?'

"I'll do anything anyone asks me, as long as they say please".

Holden's heart beat wildly, as he stared at the fire extinguisher in the driver's cab and imagined taking it to the Daleknt's fragile head. A resolve came that if the boy got off beside one the badly lit lanes, Holden would accompany him and beat him to a pulp. Back in New York, a gazillion years ago, he'd been in about a dozen fights and lost every one. Here it would be different. The devolved Daleks were so much smaller and weaker than him. Prone. Unprepared. Complacent. But hadn't that always been the case, to a degree? Flashbacks of the aggrieved pimp in the Edmont Hotel, way back in the stupid and wildly episodic days of his nervous breakdown. The man had sat down in a chair with his back to him. There had been numerous items Holden could have improvised into a weapon, and that girl, the whore, was far too dizzy to have aided her master. A gazillion years ago on the same world.

The yob did indeed shoulder his way off in a dark little lane, yet something prevented Holden from following him. It was, he felt sure, the proximity to home. Just another twenty minutes while the gravity of Pheobe and John's love pulled him in. Except -the rage was replaced by a sordid philosophical drive, even as he stalked his way across the barley fields. The cows raised hell with their mooing, having been corralled into the pens just a few minutes ago. Elliot sat on his horse a little way off, between the yard and the fields, staring hard at the winter sky.

"Will you get off your horse?", said Holden.

"What's the matter?", Elliott sounded unsurprised.

"We need to do something".

Elliott dismounted and followed his friend to an arbitrary corner of an arbitrary grazing field, far out of sight of the main compound.

"Knock knock", said Holden, shaking.

"I don't understand", said Elliot flatly.

"Knock knock. Who's there?" Holden repeated the words in a fearfully portentous voice that scared them both. He repeated it again and again, before realising that he'd said them in the wrong order. He'd failed, even in this. Even in his madness, he had messed up.

He gulped, breathed deeply, never out of sync with the shaking hands or crazy heart-rate.

"Who's there? Knock knock".

Elliot's eyes filled with fear, for the first time ever. Holden stared in wonder. Thinking back to the saucer-crash -now some twenty years ago-, even then the Captain had been unmoved. It was bizarre. In time, Holden turned around himself - to witness the tall, black figure who'd appeared from thin air.

A man, of indeterminate age and swathed wildly in black stubble and inky eyes, regarded them with an overfamiliar smile. His clothes were elaborate: black jeans, black fisherman's jumper.

"Holden. Elliot. It's good to finally see you".

"Who are you?", asked Elliott, back to his imperious self.

"My name is Zradca Black. My friends, I've been with you all along. I was with you on the Dalek ship which brought you here. I am one of you".

"I'll repeat", said Elliott, "who are you, please?"

Holden, aiming to be more sympathetic, eased forward a few steps. "Are you a ghost?"

Black, though he was sardonic as a default, smiled warmly. "Yes. 'Ghost' is as good a word as any".

"I guess it's the right time of year for them". Holden smiled, even as he heard himself babbling.

"It's Halloween?", asked the newcomer.

Said Holden, "Christmas".

"Ah, I forgot about Christmas".

A sharp question from Elliott, "You say you're a ghost. How did you die?"

The newcomer became lost, for a long time genuinely trapped in some distant world. His eyes flicked sullenly at all thoughts of the past. "It doesn't matter. Everyone dies. It doesn't matter a damn".

Ribbing from Holden now, as though they really had been friends for years; "What kind of a name is 'Zradca'?"

"You get used to it", said Black quietly.

Losing all tact, Holden proceeded to seize the man's shoulder. He found it quite warm and solid. Elliott circled him and narrowed his eyes in fascination. Space-aliens. Ghosts. Implausibility could sometimes give you hope. Black smiled at his new friends' candour. Their capacity for enthralled reverence, and the rest.

"It's Christmas", he said, and then brightly. "It's Christmas-time, and I have a gift for you, and the whole of human civilisation".

"_'Human civilisation'_", the words sorrowfully intoned by Elliott.

"The Daleks' greed and laziness have ruined this planet. They're dying. It can happen sooner or later. I say sooner".

"Speak on", said Elliott, as a kind of suave professor.

Meanwhile, dimly, Holden wondered if he was dreaming.

"The giant glowing spheres spread across the surface of the planet. I know they've fascinated you for a long time. For good reason. They are called Capital Spheres, and they were part of a secret joint-operation by the original Earth super-powers to foil the Dalek invasion".

"What do they do?", asked Holden falteringly.

"They are receptacles for a quantum-level electro-magnetism which is ambient in the planet's atmosphere. This energy is harmless to humans. To the Dalek brain, however, it acts as compressor of the RNA signals in their neural synapses. If the energy could be saturated into the atmosphere to a sufficient degree -they would suffer terrible strokes and die, en masse. I suppose…like the Martians getting colds in War of the Worlds. Perfect, poetic justice. The spheres were designed for exactly this purpose, to implement and magnify the Earth's natural defences against stupid little invaders".

Holden and Elliott stood perilously silent. Eventually, it was Holden who asked the necessary question, though it felt somehow arbitrary.

"So why was it never set off, this planet-wide Dalek-killing machine?"

Black tightened his over-sized, under-expressive lips. He stepped backwards a little, as if to lay bare the whole story in all its seeming incredulity, for the farmers to judge impartially. Still he was carefully to move his eyes equally between them. "The governments of the Earth knew that the Dalek invasion was coming. They rushed to finish the spheres, and narrowly succeeded. But that was only part of it. The central hub of the Capital Sphere network is here, barely forty miles away in Baliark, the town formerly known as Ashford, I believe. But as you might imagine, such a network required an unbelievably sophisticated and rugged computer to co-ordinate it. And again, such a device was built, at speed -but it never made it to the central hub. It was in a plane, a hercules transport out of Lyneham, UK -which fell from the sky along with all other planes come the Daleks' arrival. It now lies in little under twenty feet of water, a quarter of a mile off the coast of Nambucca Heads. Tragically, _ridiculously_ near to its destination -just miles shy of being able to keep the Earth in human hands forevermore".

Elliott slowly nodded his head into a thoughtful pose. Either that or one of the desperate, galloping knights of his beloved chess set. Just beyond them at the borders of the farm, the steely winter light was extremely well saturated, a recompense for the icy cold.

"How do you know these things, Mr Black?"

"I am a ghost", said Black, not quite stoically. "I commune with other ghosts".

Holden remembered that day at the ruins, when a disincarnate Zradca Black whispered in his ear, 'I have an important mission for you'.

"You want us to somehow dive down to this plane, find the computer, take it to this 'hub' thing, then complete the killing of the Daleks".

Black shrugged. "What I want is of no consequence. I'm a ghost. The question is, how much longer are you willing to live under the heel of these tiny creatures, with their laziness and their greed forcing all of civilisation over a precipice?"

Elliott gave a sharp laugh. "You have an interesting use of semantics. Calling yourself a ghost, as if this means anything to us. Outer-space aliens, I believe in, because I have seen them and they make sense through a probable cosmic evolution. But ghosts? We humans are too slight to be awarded any kind of afterlife. I'm quite sure, when we die, there is nothing".

Black smiled at this, very slowly and patiently. His days-old five o'clock shadow sometimes looking like a full-on black beard, sometimes looking like no more than grease and a shading of crisis-stubble.

Elliott continued. His oval-eyes winced. "What I see when I look at you, Mr Black, is just another alien. And how are we to know that you aren't the agent of a far worse alien race, vying to take the place of the Daleks?"

"There is no race worse than the Daleks", said Black. "They are laziness and selfishness incarnate. Imagine a race that was -war incarnate, perhaps. Religious zeal incarnate. At least these characteristics would slowly, gradually force some vague kind of self-insight. Laziness can only ever hide from itself, pulling inwards and inwards until the world implodes".

"Poetic", said Elliott.

Black nodded dully. It was a very intellectual impasse, sensed Holden, and every little nuance had to be accounted for. They stood at the tilted edge of the field, casual cowboys one and all, wincing, scowling, endlessly pragmatic. Eventually, Black took great steps across the frozen chaff and stared directly into Elliott's eyes, Holden's, Elliott's.

"I will never betray you", he said simply.

Who said anything about betrayal? Holden clasped himself as he decided that Black's choice of words really had revealed him as some jittery, turncoat spy. Except. It was obvious Elliott felt differently. 'Betrayal' - the elephant in the room, from the beginning of time. No one alive could bear to acknowledge the fact that there was never any true solidarity between human beings. It could only ever be acknowledged by a ghost. A perfect, Christmas ghost.

"What does the computer look like?", Holden found the questions came quickly and easily now, without much thought. "What makes you think we can get to it, in this sunken plane? What makes you think the water won't have messed it up royally after all these years?"

"It looks -", Black moved his eyes ponderously, "like a palm-sized golden box, and comprised of such a tight, detailed mechanism that the most skilled Swiss watch maker -his brow would smooth and his eye-glass would smash to the floor".

Elliott shook his head. "As Holden said, there's no kind of metal that can withstand hundreds of years of exposure to sea-water, no matter how pure it is, how close to the surface".

But the man Black had an answer. "In my age, there was a famous science-fiction quote, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. In much the same way, the box is impervious. You are the Knights of Camelot and this is your Excalibur. With it, you will drive off all enemies".

By now, Holden was staring at the grey ridges of dead barley midway up the field. "Perhaps we should try", he said. Cum is white. I'll do anything anyone asks me, as long as they say please. Thinking: disallowed, therefore rage is inconceivable, and imagine their surprise. Floating round joyously at the ceiling of your already-compromised thoughts: DISALLOWED. Mr Chief-Attacker.

Elliott: bemused. "He's your imaginary friend. You say, 'perhaps'. I say 'undoubtedly'. But I bow to your discretion".

Holden looked at Black, who now seemed very far way. "How do we even find this sunken plane?"

"Do you have a Global Etherfield Positioner?"

Holden nodded yes -they'd used it to confirm the farm boundaries, so long ago, back in the day.

"Then you can relax", said Black. "You've had the co-ordinates all long".

He moved close to Holden and rolled up the sleeve of his heavy winter coat. Holden stared down at the ancient faded tattoo.

Explained Black, "I've been with you a very long time" -and promptly vanished into thin air.

A strange thing -not the strangest, but up there: as soon as they were alone again, all thoughts of Zradca Black vanished and there was only the mission. When Holden activated his hated personal-communicator to tell Evashavi that he would not see her for a while due to some escaped or rustled sheepoids -there was a significant part of him that believed the lie. Calmly, they loaded up the four-by-four with every salient item they could think of. The thing they needed most, naturally, was absent -a wet suit. Elliott insisted that he was quite capable of taking the long, exploratory dive, time after time if necessary. He'd been 'a successful swimmer' during his university days. Was this still the case, asked Holden, ice-cold weather and all? Even as he asked, he remembered Elliott's 'mediation', his prescient love affair with pain and endurance. "I am capable", spoken with a mysterious lack of stress on the words.

Holden stared at him, a fully-loaded wagon and time ticking away between them. "I guess that's the way it's got to be. Even if we went to some stupid yuppie diving store, they'd only have wet-suits to fit Daleks anyway, and there's no way they'd cover a human body. It would be like getting strangled".

Elliott nodded. Thought Holden, 'All this talk of pain'. They gingerly climbed aboard the wagon, a few dim thoughts of Pheobe and John - though mainly just with the mission to guide them forward. The feeling of participating in perfect, immaculate solution was in full swing. In difference to the advice of the Global Positioning Device, Elliott made his own way through the wintry desert, through several little towns. The device expected you to cling to the Dalek-built motorways, and to hell with that.

The journey took little time. Holden snatched little looks at his watch as time itself took heavy blinks and rushed forward. Truly it was a philosophical, nigh-emotional platter, staring out at the night-dulled nooks and crannies which they lazily swung past. He stared at a little outpost of electrical substations mired in great, tangled thorn bushes, not too far from the coast. The maintenance of such a place was no doubt very rugged and intensive work. Highly skilled? Perhaps it was an example of that fabled mixture of both semi-skilled manual work and advanced, academic knowledge. Probably, the Daleks worked hand-in-hand with humans. Holden felt moved when he thought of this. Similarly, there was the memory of when Pheobe had taken a tumble from her first horse, Haystacks, and the Dalek doctor had treated her shattered pelvis with such speed and precision. If only there was a machine which could destroy all frivolous and unnecessary jobs on a conceptual level, while leaving anything practical intact. But no. Not even that. Holden wanted to understand the laziness of the Daleks. If only there was a machine which could look inside their yuppie heads, and coolly give him a report to analyse.

Profoundly depressed, Holden stared out into the dark. The frontages in small human coastal towns reared up like poised dominoes. Always staring, thinking about several different things at once, sometimes even relaxed. If only it wasn't necessary to try and imagine how the lazy Daleks must think. That was the worst thing of all. The ability to think -consciousness- it was sacred, always. But their thoughts? Must be closer to death than life. It was all about mundane, desk-worker ambition playing hand-in-hand with endless, death-bound delusion. Meanwhile, the human bluecollars had minds filled with colour and light. Pro-activity versus nothingness, and Holden craned his neck over the back seats to see if any of the Capital Spheres were visible. They were, just about. Equally showy were the clingy, loving snowflakes which had started to gravitate to the back window. It was strange. The mission seemed ugly and misguided, though he couldn't say exactly why. It wasn't as if the Daleks weren't definitely a scourge and deserved to die.

It was revealed that they'd have to take a mile-long farm track down to the coast, alongside the thick wire fences of industrial estates, then grubby urban hedgerows the size of houses. No particular ambience told of being close to the sea, yet the Global Positioner showed they'd almost hit upon that great, empty expanse. The glowing arrow which represented the four-by-four blinked away confidently. The submerged plane was represented merely as a cross-hair. The ship yard, from which they'd steal a row-boat, was a surprisingly large, dark-blue square.

Eventually, the lane tapered into a grassy footpath, forcing them to labour forward on foot. The dawn had started to emerge as a dim, giddy strip on the matte-grey horizon. The falling snow: a cheeky adornment.

"This is a hell of a thing we're doing", said Holden as they trudged forward.

"Hell is what you make it", said Elliott, then indulged him further. "At least now we will be free".

Holden fingered the shoulder-strap of the heavy ruc-sac, though he could never quite make a fist around it. "Maybe being free doesn't matter that much".

Said Elliott, with an expression that seemed the cruel side of blank, "You're worried about Evashavi. I thought you were sure you don't love her?"

"Yeah", Holden sighed. "I'm pretty sure I don't love her".

"Then what on Earth is the problem?"

Holden hitched up the bag, watched his breath emanate smoothly into the cold.

"Are you crazy? Just because you don't love someone doesn't mean you should let them die".

Elliott narrowed his eyes. "And why not, Holden? Clarity of thought, clarity of motivation and commitment. These are the things which will save this planet".

They arrived at the edge of the shipyard, which was completely open and without any gates or fences. Obviously the Dalek owners believed that the distance from any real civilisation was enough that no one would ever come by to rob them. Holden and Elliott crouched behind some frosty blades of grass and stared into the compound. There was zero red-faced alcoholic playboys getting ready to sail for cc. Zero security jerks. Zero boat technicians tending to the deliriously smooth keels of dry-docked yachts. The farmers looked around the ghost-town-with-boats breathing easy.

"Maybe", conceded Holden. He suddenly thought of something all-important. "You know what? After all we've been through, you've never told me much about your family. I mean, I know you had a mother and all, but -"

"This is not really the time for gentle conversation", said Elliott as he scanned the exposed, triangular huts. Holden, suddenly overwhelmed by everything, was happy to let him do the hunting. A ten-foot long railing not-quite ancillary to the main yard grabbed his attention. He placed his eye at one end and convinced himself he could see distant light amongst the echoey black -he took a marble from his pocket and popped it into the end, listened carefully as it made a tickley descent, six feet or more. But it didn't go all the way. Of course it didn't, because the end had been bunged up by rubbish. The Daleks block everything up with rubbish. It's what they do.

Hunting through the sheds, over the reasonably smooth concrete launchers, Holden got to thinking once more. On the close-by horizon, the daylight was coming through in earnest. It had moved slowly, but now it was here, he was shocked. Incredibly harsh and resolute shades of grey and pink were Christmassy. Perhaps not overwhelmingly so -still there was no ignoring the thoughtful atmos. He trudged forward, Mr Glum.

"It's funny how we're doing this just a few days before Christmas. I mean, I hate films with a passion, but one of the things I hate most of all is when a film is set at Christmas time, just by coincidence. Why do they have to make a point of it?"

Elliott said simply, "There's a one-in-twelve chance. It's legitimate, though meaningless".

Holden shrugged deeply. "Maybe the problem is how I think about it. I always think of Christmas as special somehow".

"'Peace and good will to all'", intoned Elliott. He shook his head mournfully.

Madly, the water either side of them ranged from being black to offering sensational little tunnels of translucence dozens of feet down. The act of rowing killed Holden's elbows; the cold air made his legs feel small and scratchy. A hell of a thing, also, the way Elliott sat so bolt upright, silent, pulling his mouth into that wildly melodramatic sneer. A hell of a thing that Holden could just absorb it without having to look away. Occasionally, he felt himself smile, though god knew what it meant. Half way between meta-narrative buoyancy and pure style.

He rowed, as if given a strange kinetic power by his strange impatience. Truly it was winter -directly overhead, the gray daylight was a constant companion now and probably wouldn't change pitch again before sunset. In fact, there was no punctuation whatsoever; Elliott hardly ever glanced at the positioner. When he did, it was with a mighty scowling. Meanwhile snow zig-zagged crazily, always fizzing out on the sea in the weirdest way imaginable. Enter the belief that it was all quite timeless, hypnotic. Thoughts of the hercules very far below, tragic, like a dead relative in the ground. Holden made a particularly wide arch of the oars. There was a sudden jerk -

"Oh!"

It blended almost seamlessly with the long, smooth waves - a gigantic, steel-and-rust coloured wing, so closely connected with the surface that it had a constant, rippling varnish of blue. They glared down through the water-skewed perspective to the lumpy connection of the main fuselage, a deeply ghostly mass, window-indents the shape of an angry and unforgiving brow. Colossal.

"Whoa. Jeez-uss ! Look at that, for Christ's sake. I've never seen anything like it. I mean, if I had to be honest with you, that is an awesome sight".

Elliot merely stood tall and glared over the edge, shoulders drawn high in gentle anticipation.

"It's like some kind of -", Holden braced the sides of the boat. His eyes darted wildly. "What's that word when something's a symbol for something really important?"

"I don't know", said Elliott, gruff and terse beyond words.

After a moment or two, Holden realised his friend was necessarily so terse because he was hurriedly stripping down to his long-johns. Guiltily, he scrambled for one of the plastic-encased lanterns and prepared to throw it over the side. They'd supposed these heavy-duty farming lights, once submerged, would work for a little while then just die. The same was probably true of the industrial ten-volt torch which Elliott had hung around his neck.

"I'll go down first", he plumped his mouth excitedly, "to get a look at the access doors, then we shall decide what kind of cutting equipment we'll need".

After he'd lowered himself in and was under, Holden regretted being too unsentimental to have said, 'good-luck'. He also regretted not having tied a rope around Elliott's middle, by which he could haul him up again if there was trouble. The scenario was perfectly insane. Generally the water was black, though around the extremities of the nose-cone, the brooding canopy, it was just clear enough to court light from the surface. And how Elliott seemed to loose control as he came near to his objective; spinning, fighting some invisible, paralysing monster. Luckily, the disorientating water never failed to underestimate Elliott's fierce determination. He reached out and made contact with the dull metal handle of the curved cockpit hatch. An almighty struggle took place, causing his back to arch horribly, something that Holden didn't like one bit. In fact, it was a motion which ultimately led to Elliott losing consciousness.

Holden's mouth cracked open in panic. Losing consciousness -for a split second. He fought away from the plane with claw-like hands and made frenzied thrusts for the surface. He dived a second time and a third time. If there was something going on in his head besides inhuman determination, Holden had no idea what it was. Though there'd now been the addition of a heavy rope to Elliott's middle, which Holden could pull on as little or as much as he needed to, the drama wasn't lessened for a second. On breaking the surface, he'd always be eerily silent, and only after a frighteningly long period did he begin gasping for breath. The problem lay with his numb hands, he explained through a jaw that shivered like some haunted air-con. He couldn't articulate and grasp them hard enough to haul the door open, even though he believed it to be unlocked. As he explained this to Holden, it was a nice little moment of solidarity -wholly incidental comradeship, since he knew nothing would stop him diving once more, or as many time as was necessary.

Holden stared awestruck, not only at the almighty size of the plane, but how partitioned it must be within -even if Elliott made it inside, the next time he lost consciousness, as he inevitably would, the line would be snagged, and he'd be trapped.

D.B had once told Holden, about the writing process, that he hated working on exposition -the long passages of plot explanation and dull, everyday incidents which necessarily led to the high-drama. It was only now that Holden felt his heart curl with the realisation that he was the exact opposite; he hated drama and loved everyday, nothingy intrigues. Talking, just talking. And if that wasn't enough for you, you could always lie and BS. It was a real, living tragedy that this business with the plane had traumatised him so much, he'd be unable to relate it to anyone if they asked him about it.

Elliott never seemed in danger of drowning. No doubt, it was the iced water and the spasmodic punishment taken by his muscles which would probably finish him. He strained at the door - and it opened. The insides, after all this time, were also fully flooded, though that didn't stop a cloud of specks and mud-coloured bits from filling the air. Either like a cartoon character or an epic, renaissance biblical painting, Elliott steeled his shoulders and prepared to move through the hatch. There was nothing pathetic about it as his arms and legs failed him. All the way it was noble, as he sprawled and lost consciousness for what must surely be the last time.

Holden heaved, something fierce. The water around the boat lapped quietly -a thoroughly shameless concern for the high, human drama. When Elliott was finally brought to the surface, it was as an ugly, prone mass of woollen fibre and fearfully white shin. Hauling him aboard -just the touch of him caused a strange, overwhelming numbness to the fleshy parts of Holden's hands.

This time he did not regain consciousness. A reasonable assumption was that he'd had a heart attack. Holden held him tightly and screamed for him to wake.

In the end - "Let me go back!", he rasped mightily.

The muscles which tried to pull away from him, Holden found, were ridiculously weak. As if he could. Spontaneously, he remembered the feel of lifting the Dalek Haharman from his battle suit that first day.

"We'll come back in the summer!", cried Holden.

"No! I have to get it. I can't stand to live in this place a moment longer".

Holden wondered what to say. Even if there were requisite words, it was unlikely that Elliott's delirious mind could decode anything bar the simplest syllables. So he said simply, "I know!"

He thought of the teenagers on the bus. The one or two human farmers and factory employees paying for the lives of the most feckless people imaginable, the thing called 'society' a giant rapist visible only to the sane or suicidal.

"I know".

Elliott's body was rigid as Holden moved it to one side to snatch up the oars. "I'm going to get us out of here". He rode away from the wing, the jumpy motion of the waves seeming to cheer them as they thrust forward. Sea-skimming blasts of cold air gave no quarter for thought. Did he need to think? Perhaps it was enough just to have his heart pounding and the oars giving good pull. He glared at the quaking shoulders of his friend. His head dipped forward like that of a severely disabled man.

"Elliott! Don't fall asleep! Stay awake!"

To his credit, he moved in reaction to Holden's words - not quite enough to relieve the tension, however.

"Elliott!"

Holden drew himself up so that he could get clearance, enough to thump the man's shoulder with the flat of his foot. The white, damaged head moved as much though the natural traction of neck-sinews than by conscious design. There was still a ghost in the machine, however.

_"Battlefield medicine basic_". His words were barely audible above the sea. Waves, foam and oar-splashes were just the start of it. His head continued to roll forward, eyes aiming for a respectable dominion of Holden's end of the boat and actually focusing on nothing whatsoever. "In cases of hypothermia, you worry. You worry only if the patient stops shaking. If lips turn blue. In cases of -"

And no sooner did Holden have this to worry about than Elliot did indeed seem to stop shaking. It happened several times, and he hoped that it was just a matter of perspective. Perhaps his body had already started to right itself, or the shaking had started to level out into tremors too small for his eyes to catch. All except for the way Elliott's pose seemed so curiously still within the mound of blankets, Holden would have believed he was getting better.

They bumped down onto the low, concrete launcher. To take Elliott arm-in-arm and try to stagger back to the four-by-four was completely out of the question.

"I'm coming back, Elliott. Can you hear me?"

He sprinted through the boat yard and along the overgrown footpath. He sprinted along the lane, in awe at how he managed to avoid slipping on the long stretches of ice that were undetectable beneath the white. For no reason beside infinitesimal shifts of air-pressure, the overhead branches would occasionally release huge tumbles of snow.

The engine started first time and Holden took the four-by-four to the very end of the lane, where he smashed at speed through the little wooden fence. To keep level across the verges of the footpath was skilled work without a doubt. Neither did it make any odds that the windows were badly clogged with snow. The world beyond could be distinguished only as amorphous fields and puffed, overblown trees. No place for anyone, really.

"Elliott!"

It was a relief that he moved, less of a relief when the noise he emitted was a tortured howl. Holden eased him aboard and they took off in an accident-baiting spin. Driving at speed over the bulbous surfaces, and Holden forcing himself to ignore the tiny, pained movements made by his companion. Sometimes, snow blasted before them like dust-motes in a sun-lit room, as fine as that. They swerved and made unbelievable time. The long, long lane was almost at end, but not before the nastiest surprise of all.

Three plough-skirted Dalek fighting machines blocked the way. No laughing matter, still Holden found it awesomely funny. Midnight, with noise and unemployment-souled Dalek teenagers tearing up every tranquil park on the planet -never any law enforcement in sight. Yet some vague report of two humans within spitting distance of a yacht anchorage and out comes the goon squad.

"HALT! OR YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED!"

Holden remained expressionless while tilting his head as if to say, 'No'.

He'd always felt that the Dalek police force had missed a trick by not having their battle-suits made out of copper, too. May as well make them funny. Certainly they were frightening in a way, but only for all the scuzzy people who knew fear anyway. Taking the three goons at top speed, almost-but-not-quite managing to drive in a straight line, the impact was bone-crunching. It wasn't even over yet. To their right, they'd run aground on the compacted plough of the third Dalek. To their left, the first Dalek was pinned down, still quite able to move his eye-stalk frantically against the window of the unconscious Elliott. The middle Dalek, at least, had been knocked clean into the verge. Holden leaned over his friend, jarred the door open to knock Mister's eye heavenward. Then the four-by-four powered onwards to the small, rounded road that was so pleasingly anonymous. In the rear-view -

It was both satisfying and troubling to see the three Daleks still incapacitated. Holden had often read that the recession was causing shoddy equipment to be used in domestic law-enforcement. He'd hoped that it was just press sensationalism. But no. Everything really is a shambles, and the world is dying.

In the meantime -

"Alright! I'm awake!", said Elliott.

"Woo-hoo!", said Holden.

From the mountainous base of blankets by the log fire, Elliott was enjoying his fifth cup of whisky-laced chocolate. This was fine -Holden was enjoying making them for him. Loosened up, re-energised, winning the battle against his ice-cooked skin, the Captain was for the first time starting to reminisce about his family. His mother was Lilly, an always-happy community-pillar from the heart of Winchester, England. His father, Terence, had been killed in the Jomhuri Eslami-ye uprising, long before Elliott had any conscious memory of him. A preternatural number of friends and relatives described Terence Spencer as 'kind' and so that's how he chose to think of him. Looming large in his childhood memory, there was also Uncle Bertrand, a friendly and hideously racist old sea-dog, who Elliott loved crazily for being the most practical man alive. Elliott's fiancee Yvonne, a ballet dancer, had abandoned him in 1909, though he still dreamed about her every other night, for better or worse.

Holden wondered if it was just the alcohol or his near-death-experience which was allowing Elliott to speak so openly about his family. He didn't think it was the liquor, not yet -for every three fingers of whisky which he poured into the hot chocolate, he took another two for himself. The drunkenness, if that's what it was, wasn't particularly sentimental. At the end of things, he just wished there was some clever-clever explanation about how they could be both loving men and able to live in such a horrible, destructive world. But there was no explanation, and he'd just have to live with it. Staring at the dramatic flames, he dared to believe that Elliott's weakened state, coupled with the sneaky deployment of liquor, meant that for the first time ever, he'd be able to keep up with the party and not get hysterical. Maybe get right to the end of things, where everything is mysterious, mysteriously happy, endlessly thought-provoking.

Pheobe explained that she was going to treat herself to a luxurious bubble-bath in the far outhouse. This was a long-awaited cue, it seemed; John ducked into the next room and returned with his guitar. Elliott lolled his head and smiled -this in itself was strange. Usually, John's long, centre-parted hair was a source of incredulity. Now it just seemed to be accepted.

"Uncle Holden, Uncle Elliott, listen", he said excitedly. "I've written mam a song, right, as a kind of Christmas present. Will you give me your honest opinion? If you don't like it, you can always throw me guitar on the fire".

Cheekily, Elliott leant forward through the swathes and shook his hand to seal the agreement.

John slipped on his tiny spectacles, the ones which Holden had previously only associated with English librarians. He lifted his hand above the strings and prepared to play, before thinking of something all-important.

"If you find you like it, you can rattle your jewellery", he smiled.

"I'm already rattling", said Elliott.

The strummed chords were refreshingly simple, just three or four notes lilting through some snowscape lullaby -relaxing, and thoroughly unashamed of it. "_So this is Christmas, and what have you done? Another year over, and a new one just begun. And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun. The near and the dear ones_ -"

By the end, Holden was clutching his sides as if it was he who'd been thrust into the freezing ocean. He rubbed his face, had no idea how to express himself without sounding like an over-emotional lunatic emerging from a whole sea of whisky. Luckily, it was Elliott who took the heat off by saying, "Very stirring. 'Gentle' is the word. Too good for busking, or busk and make fortune".

"I'm kind of lost for words", said Holden. "Amazingly performed, John. But also -true".

The desert was layered with crispy ice that was daunting to walk through. Holden carried himself a long way out, until the farm was just a low, snow-bound bunker and an insanely prominent column of smoke. He turned to face the open horizon, white-and-pink entirely, and casually slipped out his personal communicator.

"Emergency response", said an unknowable female voice. "Which service do you require, city police, ambulance, fire -"

"Police", said Holden worriedly.

"Can you tell me where you are?"

"Not yet", Holden tightened his freezing shoulders. "Just listen, and I'll tell you what the nature of the problem is. I'm a terrorist, in a terrorist gang. Are you listening?"

"Yes", said the woman, after a pause. He got the distinct impression she was a human.

"We were preparing a kind of bomb, that uses the giant spheres to send out death to all Daleks everywhere. We were on our way to set it off, in a plane, and it crashed in the ocean. This all sounds crazy, but I'm not joking. The global positioning co-ordinates of the submerged plane are -", he lifted up his sleeve and read off the tattoo, hating forever the ye-olde Dalek alphabet. "One-Fray-Ki-Zero-Fray, slash Jy".

"Sir", the woman spoke in great breaths now, "you need to tell me where you are, for the simple reason that if you're involved with terrorists, in any way, you could be in danger".

He let the communicator go free from his ear slightly, staring off across the desert to the tiny outpost, the deeply human sound of John lilting out 'Merry Christmas, War is Over'.

"I don't think that's going to be a problem", he smirked.

"Where are you now, sir? Where can we arrange to meet you?"

"Listen, I've said all I'm going to say, and I'm going to go now. I'm going to wish you Merry Christmas".

"Sir, you really need to tell me your name", she said, as flustered as he'd ever heard anyone.

"I'm going to say Merry Christmas, and I wish you'd say it to me in turn. Will you do that?"

In a heartbeat, the woman was calculating the odds on whether Holden really was a terrorist, mentally ill, lonely -all of the above. When she spoke again, it was in a tone of complete bitterness. "You've just told me you're a terrorist. I don't know whether you are or not, but I should tell you that the penalty for misusing the emergency hot-line is a fine of two-thousand Dalekredits or a six-month prison sentence".

Holden felt his brow turn despairing, as he stared up into the purple-velvet sky, the place where soon there'd be stars. A saucer buzzed by, thousands of feet up, flashing red and green, red and green. "Ooo. A six-month prison sentence? Are you sure that's not going to cost the government too much? Maybe I can give them a loan out of my piggy bank".

The woman was silent. It was just possible she was smiling. An infinitesimal chance. He liked the odds.

"Listen. What I've told you is true. A-1. You've got the damn co-ordinates and you can go and look any time. I'm going to say Happy Christmas and then hang up, and wish you'd say the same".

No; the woman was angry. "You call yourself a terrorist and yet you're wishing me Happy Christmas -when I could be one of the next people you kill. It sounds to me as though you want to co-operate".

"I really don't want to co-operate", Holden glowered. "It's just for this one day, this one moment, I'm something more than a terrorist and you're something more than a police phone-jockey. We're like -whattaya call it- symbols of the human condition. Something better even that that. The hope that things can turn out O.K, even in this stupid and unfair world".

Holden found himself lost for words. The woman was in a similar position. It wasn't even as if he was choked with emotion.

"Merry Christmas", he said.

"Merry Christmas", said the woman.

He deactivated the communicator and threw it, under-arm, as hard as he could into the ice-dimmed desert. And that was that. Wondering back to the farm, he slipped over onto his rump, and gave a small laugh. The End of Civilisation had never been better.

A high consumption of exotic spirits. Games: Jenga, Buckaroo, Biblical Trivial Pursuit (it was the only version that had cultural references that were common to them all). Being forced to ignore the plots of unusually good films in favour of involved conversations and anecdotes. Christmas Lunch: Holden reluctantly eating yams even though he really didn't like them. John reluctantly eating parsnips because he thought he disliked them, only to find he loved them. A childhood memory of one of the Caulfield's neighbour's dogs eating so much food that his stomach had exploded, and could this happen to a human? The afternoon ghost-story; Pheobe's scary but unbelievable, Elliott's believable but unscary. More drinking, just enough to keep their heads alighted. More Jenga, this time with each member of the party nominating strange objects from around the room as a result of truth-or-dare incredulity. Half-hearted arm-wrestling. Time for Satanic Christmas Cake, which Elliott loved and everyone else merely liked. Compromise: they'd tuck in to very small portions, but only after they'd taken a long walk across the prairie to drive the lunch deeper into their stomachs.

Holden pulled on his corduroy-armoured jacket and it'd never felt better; his hunting cap felt like an entirely new article of clothing. Pheobe in purple, John in a sheepskin jacket over his fashion-dodging denim. The long trench-coat of Elliott Spencer: like a fortress wall.

"It's cold!", said Pheobe, and it really was.

They followed the curve in the lane, then broke off onto open ground. The air was weirdly crisp, seeming to pull everything upwards into the white-to-pink vortex. And it could only get stranger as they meandered between the defiant xerophytes, the cacti shrugging harder than ever now they were desaturated. The farm was almost completely forgotten about. They only looked back once a monstrous engine was heard, pounding and riffing the snow as it raced toward La Ponderosa Caulfield. Holden and Elliott reached tentatively for their guns as they scanned the horizon for the frenzied vehicle.

But it was familiar. The panic abated -slightly- as the mighty black cruiser pulled up by the crook of the lane and Evashavi jumped down. Face like thunder, she stalked across the icy plain, Holden preparing himself as best he could. In her tiny grey hands, she was grasping something unwieldy -something or things that obviously made her furious.

"Hello", she began venomously. "Hello, you seedy little weed. I just want you to know that I found your guilty little stash".

She held up the pile of Playboy Specials, the uppermost: 'Natural Beauties' from December 2011. Oppressively-sensual-looking Carly Ford covering her tantalisingly small breasts. She took aim and flung it Holden's head; he ducked -it missed by a wide margin.

"Ay! Will you just calm down for a second?"

She proceeded to beat him around the head with the Sexy 100 from Febuary 2009. Rachelle Leah, surely the most svelte and girl-nosed wrestling host the world had seen, or would ever see.

"Listen", said Holden, quite bravely and indifferent to the sharp stabs of the thick little spines. "Just listen for a second, will ya?"

John made a snowball and without taking much of an aim, hit Evashavi squarely on the forehead.

"Ay! Dammit, John, that's not helping. Apologise to your auntie!"

But actually it did help, forcing Evashavi backwards slightly, to thrash at Holden from a wider radius. He smoothly lifted his hands to pull her wrists together, finally halting the onslaught but causing the magazines to flop wildly into the snow -which irked him to the ends of the earth.

"Lo-ha! Now listen just a sec -I hate those magazines. I only kept them because they're Collector's Items. They're hundreds of years old! They're worth a bomb! Look -", he fished a random magazine from the snow. "It says 'Collector's Edition' on the spine. How do you like that?"

Taking no time to think, "You're full of flip".

Insisting, "Come on! Look at these girls, how old-fashioned they look. I could no more find them sexy than I could get aroused over some Victorian lady in a ball gown" (mentally biting his tongue as the magazine he held flopped open at Taylor Stone, Miss Mississippi 2011 and the most clothes-hating girl he'd ever seen).

"Where did you even get this scummy filth?", she ranted.

"I found it in an abandoned house", he shrugged. "But 'filth'? It's not even hardcore".

"That would make it better?", she exploded. "I repeat: you're utterly full of flip".

He sensed the end game was coming and, still clasping her hands together, drew perilously close. "I guess you're right to be angry. I only kept them because I was thinking about our retirement. I'm a farmer! I don't have any pension money coming".

Evashavi said nothing for a moment, and he decided to chance his hand by saying, 'I love you'. His mouth actually opened -before a strange pause, an eerie train of thoughts involving Elliott Spencer's long-long-lost fiancee. 'Yvonne' -he'd said he dreamed of her every other night, for better or worse. Holden couldn't deny the same phenomenon occurred with Evashavi. Every other night? Try every night, either book-ending his feature dream or else dominating the whole shebang. Indulged in bitter arguments, or the anticipation of bitter arguments, or else going on funny road trips together, quite happy and loving. He'd never dreamed of any of those Playboy girls, not once. But this small, ravenous woman with the one eye bigger than the other. It was, he realised, a hell of a thing to be with the girl of your dreams, even if life was sometimes bitter. We have to build a wall around our hearts, with the ones we love on the inside.

"I love you", he said in a simple, too-business-like tone. "And if you want my solution: I say we take these things out the desert and bury them again. We'll come back when we're seventy and dig them up, sell them on Kree-Bay for a thousand Dalekreds apiece".

Evashavi puckered her lips and agreed to this. She frog-marched him to the farm just to get a spade and then back out into the great, empty expanse. Deep contrast was the thing now: a whitish landscape against tumbling, blink-shaped ebbs of purple rising into space. Snow came down with a slowness that was oppressive or relaxing, depending on the moment. They walked, and seemed reconciled. 'The Christmas Day I buried my Playboys' -it was a thing of legend, and he was almost proud. Pride, perhaps, shared by Evashavi, going by the slight, anarchic pull at the corner of her mouth.

"Here!" She paced in a circle beside an anonymous broken-down wall.

Holden started work with the spade and immediately felt his heart plunge.

"This ground is frozen. It's going to take forever. Are you sure you don't want to come back when it's warmed up a bit?"

Said Evashavi, "Are you sure you don't want me to take that spade and whack you upside the head?"

"I'll tell you what I want", said Holden, grabbing her by the waist and extracting a writhing, merciless kiss. Held, enjoyed, tied with a giddy, schoolgirl giggle and then a sharp little hand pushing him away.

"Get back to work. Bury them deep. I'm going back to the farm", she said hoitily. "I'll be in bed by the time you get back. And then that digging will be the least of your work. Say, 'Yes, Ma'am'".

"Yes, Ma'am", and he saluted, even as she walked away. Hips.

Alone, digging the near-solid ground, his smile never once faded. Lungs permitting, he sung John's Christmas song, as much of it as he could remember. Soon the heat on his shoulders and piston-arms gave the whole environ an odd feeling of summer. And his smile became ponderous.

"Hello Holden".

Cramped muscles or no, Holden stood up quickly to see the mad, stubble-strewn face of Zradca Black.

"Hey-ya, Mr Black. Merry Christmas".

Black reciprocated and smiled faintly.

"Listen", Holden carelessly rubbed the sweat from his brow. "I'm sorry we weren't able to complete your mission, I really am. It was exciting and all. But the fact of the matter is, if I had to be honest with you -my wife is a Dalek and I love her crazily. Do you mind if I ask -if you're a ghost now, why do you hate the Daleks so much? Why do you want them all dead?"

Black shook his head slightly, moved his eyes in that strange way of his. "Holden, forgive me. I've misled you. I don't hate the Daleks, and I certainly don't want them all dead. If it was up to me, I could quite easily 'tolerate' them the way you do. But my masters are a different matter".

The heat of work was gone again now, and Holden started to feel the fierce desert chill once more. He looked at Black and trembled slightly.

"Your masters?"

"This is the other way which I misled you. Elliott, quite sensibly, asked me if I was part of a plan to annex this planet for a far more powerful race, and I looked him in the eyes and told him no. This was a lie. I am indeed part of an advanced party, an infiltration unit, an enemy vanguard -all those silly terms. But I hope you'll see, this was a white lie, told with the best of intentions for the human race. What remains of it.

"Imagine, Holden. Can you imagine? A race of creatures, god-like, really, composed entirely of light. And just by touching you, they can take away all your sorrow, all your rage, and make it so that you never feel injustice or subjugation ever again".

As Black spoke, strange patterns of white light started to form on the snow, sweeping around, converging at his feet. They looked a little like torch beams, but with a precisely hollow centre -and besides, Holden looked around and saw nothing which could be projecting them. His mind boggled -

"Imagine an alien race that could supply you with all the power and cunning that you could ever need. Enough to destroy or bring peace to your enemies, at your discretion alone. Imagine a race that could be summoned from thin air, and recede like shadows in the blink of an eye. And all this brilliantly advanced, enlightened race needs -is your loyalty.

"Holden. Believe that such a race exists, and they have a name.

"The Mysterons".

TO BE

CONTINUED.


End file.
